The first time Julian Chavez got laid off from his job as a digital ad sales rep at web.com didn’t turn him off from the tech industry. Neither did the second time when he was laid off from ZipRecruiter. By the third time, though, Chavez had had enough.
“I really loved what I did,” said Phoenix-based Chavez in a text message. “But the layoffs got me jaded.” Now he’s pursuing a graduate degree in psychology.
Chavez is one of hundreds of thousands of tech workers who’ve been laid off in the past two years in what now seems like a never-ending wave of cuts that has upended the culture of Silicon Valley and the expectations of those who work at some of America’s richest and most powerful companies.
Last year, tech companies laid off more than 260,000 workers according to layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi, cuts that executives mostly blamed on “over-hiring” during the pandemic and high interest rates making it harder to invest in new business ventures. But as those layoffs have dragged into 2024 despite stabilizing interest rates and a booming job market in other industries, the tech workforce is feeling despondent and confused.
The U.S. economy added 353,000 jobs in January, a huge boost that was around twice what economists had expected. And yet, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Discord, Salesforce and eBay all made significant cuts in January, and the layoffs don’t seem to be abating. On Tuesday, PayPal said in a letter to workers it would cut another 2,500 employees or about 9 percent of its workforce.
The continued cuts come as companies are under pressure from investors to improve their bottom lines. Wall Street’s sell-off of tech stocks in 2022 pushed companies to win back investors by focusing on increasing profits, and firing some of the tens of thousands of workers hired to meet the pandemic boom in consumer tech spending. With many tech companies laying off workers, cutting employees no longer signaled weakness. Now, executives are looking for more places where they can squeeze more work out of fewer people.
I got into tech partially because you can scale a product much further and much cheaper than conventional industries. I was able to create and sell two small tech products/companies I made by myself, and that’s how I got into the industry.
I think in tech you can vastly cut jobs while keeping the product alive, but it’s impossible to grow a product without a solid team who knows the product deeply. These current cuts save money now and companies aren’t seeing the downside, but long term opportunities will become harder and harder to actually reach.
Having too many layers of hierarchy is bad because you can’t coordinate teams and move. Having too few means your staff will need to acquire tech debt and you’ll start seeing failures nobody understands.
This is short term gain for shareholders, long-term pain as companies will see lower growth and have to resort to more squeezing of existing customers.
You may have a case where you aren’t going to get growth in certain product lines. Meta isn’t going to see that much of an increase in Facebook or Instagram users. Google Search may see a decline as AI both provides better results and kills the ability to use the existing system.
At that point, why not just handle the managed decline of these businesses and accept these services will die?
Meta doing dividends to me says that’s where they are.
If they can’t get growth, they need to pay investors directly, or else the house of cards collapses.
And if I could short Google to 30% current value in 10 years I would, with AI they’re Yahoo and despite their best efforts aren’t even getting close to openAI, midjourney, or other AI companies, and they’re not able release the products they keep demoing to the general market.