Amazon to lay off 9,000 more workers after earlier cuts

I was in tech during the dot com bubble. It was the same then as today. In the early 2000s, there were two open tech jobs for every qualified person. Businesses like Microskills (no longer around) sprung up to teach basic network administration and other IT skills and do job placement. When the market contracted, a lot of people who were treading water or were making more than their role could afford got pushed out. It's no different now. Instead of network admin bootcamps it's coding bootcamps. Lots of people have been building a lot of dumb stuff (more than usual) for the last several years and the market is correcting.

The good news is that what came after that contraction was a huge wave of innovation that became known as Web 2.0. Most of the unicorns you're familiar with today came out of that period. Keep your chin up and you'll see.

> We've had a massive influx of new tech talent

about 1 out of 100 people i interviewed actually know how computers work, we still hired about 10 out of 100 (thats maybe 1 in 1000 cvs)

> Skip to today and I'm honestly wondering how long I have.

how long you have to do what? to learn? to make money? you will find a way to make money, i have lived with 2$ per day and with 200$ per day and its fine, some times you have to steal some bread, but its not the end of the world, and you have a life time to learn.

just don't stress too much, tech has ebbs and flows, your job does not define you.

Whether or not you should be concerned is really dependent on where you sit in the industry.

Former barista who did a 90-day bootcamp and trying to find a job? Oooof, good luck.

Have a BS in Comp Sci and work on backend/distributed systems with several years of experience? You'll have no problem finding a gig.

The vast majority of over-hiring was with engineering-adjacent roles, think project managers, recruiters, hr, etc.

Hopefully you didn't vastly expand your expenses in the heydays. We keep our committed money to where we could easily survive on $100k/year and not have a dip in our day-to-day standard of living. There is no Tesla or BMW in our driveway.

The other thing to keep in mind is that tech has attracted a lot of people in it just for the crazy money that FAANGs pay, despite that not being representative of the industry as a whole. Regardless, as that crazy money exits there will be less of those people.

At the end of the day worry without preparation is pointless. I don't think it's a tech apocalypse, but I also work for a company that was formed in the wake of the dotcom crash. Crashes can cause problems for incumbents, but it also provides opportunity for others.

You need to get a little perspective, I got hired at Amazon in Nov of 2001 after the tech bubble burst and post-9/11. There was no AWS. Amazon was purely a retailer, it was losing money every single quarter, there was no confidence that e-commerce would ultimately be competitive with brick-and-mortar.

If you're worried about ChatGPT taking your job you weren't doing much. We're still going to need humans to find the horrible bugs in codebases caused by humans copypasting ChatGPT output into production code. You need to become an actual expert in something. Pick a system that is critical to your employer and get good at it.

We live in a society with massive corporations venerated as “job creators”, even given tax breaks to come to a city and employ us. We can employ each other, thank you very much.

Many people who choose full-time work for corporations would not have an experience any differenr whether they worked in Soviet Russia or USA or Feudal Japan. These corporations (especially in Japan) are intertwined with our lives and even sense of self-worth. In Japan they coordinate with your landlord. Here they are who gives you health insurance etc.

If we had strong safety nets, none of this mentality would be an issue. You’d be jumping for joy that a project or warehouse has been automated and you don’t have to be a cog in a machine or warehouse wage slave.

That’s if we had UBI and Universal Health Insurance too. People would work on projects because they want to, whether that is art, science, open source, wikipedia or other gift economies. At the end of the day, that’s where DALL-E, ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot get their content to ape from. It’s our collective work product! We humans have given it away online for these companies to scrape and build models from.

Be proud. Stop demanding a living wage and health insurance from a corporation and start demanding a Universal Health Insurance and a UBI in your community. We have to start valuing stuff the market doesn’t.. raising children instead of government schools, taking care of our own parents instead of nursing homes. Look around … if you and your partner are working 10 hour days just to make ends meet, the problem isn’t robots taking your job. It’s society not truly valuing human beings authentically living their lives!

This is a return to sanity -- businesses need to control costs and be sustainable, product ideas need to actually make sense, you have to prove you have a good idea to get investment, etc. This is good for the long-term health of the industry.

The real problem right now is not the layoffs. The layoffs are needed, because many companies cannot reasonably justify their headcount, and it's destructive to a culture to have so many new people join so fast. If you've worked at the same company since 2021 you might have more tenure than half your coworkers!

The real problem is the hiring freezes. These especially impact new grads, but also experienced people will have trouble finding jobs simply because few companies are actively hiring. If you get laid off from a FAANG you might be able to find a startup job paying ~1/4 to 1/2 of your previous total comp. Might as well just not work for a year. Businesses overhired so much they need to shed more employees before they can even backfill or grow teams that work on things that make sense.

This happened in 2001 too, but the big difference between now and then is we aren't seeing a lot of tech companies completely fail and go out of business.

9000 jobs at one company is quite small compared to the overall industry and compared to the global shortfall in tech jobs. In Germany alone there's a 780k tech worker shortage over the next 3 years[1]. It ebbs and flows in particular companies and particular regions, but the trend is still upward globally.

[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-i...

>In 2021 I remember thinking how tech really proved its worth by so quickly assisting our economies through the pandemic with e-commerce, video conferencing and work from home.

I felt the opposite:

I have no idea how anyone could look at the tech craziness for the past 3-4 years, especially after COVID, and think any of it was sustainable. But I've also lived through a couple of these economic cycles...

I can relate to a lot of what you're saying, but I would hold my horses on that:

> we have tools like GPT potentially disrupting our careers on a timescale best viewed on the scale of months.

I am of a realistic nature that in today's craze over anything people tend to call pessimistic. However, some of the code generation examples we've seen are truly astonishing, but a far cry from replacing anyone in the real world. Best case scenarios it would save you minutes.

> We've had a massive influx of new tech talent over the last few years

You're being very generous with the word "talent" there. Things have been a bit crazy and all, but from anecdotal evidence the large influx of new developers has done what large influx always do and lowered the bar.

I've literally been asked in two different companies who boast about their standards being high to "leave aside my ideals" and have "realistic expectations", while the only thing changing in the set {expectations, hiring goals} being the latter. "we need to hire very good people very fast" while not changing anything about the process and sourcing has to make you forgo one of these two. It's physical, people don't get instantiated out of thin air.

So I think it may be harder on average to find a job in software for a while, mostly because of the direction of the job market, but it will be harder for people with less experience, and those who can do something else in which they have experience will also be incentivized to do so.

What's so frustrating this time around is that almost all of the layoffs by Big Tech are being done on what appears to be entirely speculation with no concrete financial data to support their business decisions.

Google, Amazon, Salesforce, etc. all have reported very healthy quarterly earnings and year-end results. Yet their actions are those of failing companies operating in the red for multiple quarters.

Every company is giving the same excuses --ahem, I mean reasons-- ("overhiring", "economic downturn"), laying off the same amount of people, and making their announcements within days of each other.

Have we ever seen such an industry-coordinated event like this? Especially with no public data supporting their actions?

The real reasons many believe for these layoffs amount to taking back the power & control that employees gained in 2020 until early 2022:

1. Salary correction: Compensation boomed, with major tech companies offering new grads and junior engineers job offers high than employees 2 levels higher. Has there ever been a time that employee pay raised so quickly?

2. Corporate control: Leadership wanted everyone back in the office but employees collectively refused. Can you think of another time where companies had lost this much control over their own workforce?

3. Pay Wall St: The only public financial data to support layoffs of this kind are from the stock prices, which mostly plummeted. However, they did not plummet due to poor performance but rather due to the macroeconomic events out of their control. Even at their present day levels, they are still mostly above their pre-pandemic highs. And guess what? Almost every other company's stock price in most industries fell significantly as well. With the profits erased from the surged stock prices, layoffs are the quickest and easiest way to push up a company's value.

I can only hope that employees continue to band together to know their worth and not settle for less.

I was just laid off. My new job is better and the break was amazing. 6 years ago my spouse was laid off. And by penny pinching she was able to network while on unemployment and navigate a career change. Her new job is way better.

Btw, I use copilot every day. It makes me more productive. Someday I may only use copilot or maybe I'll do something else.

Nothing is permanent. Speak to those who have been laid off, and make sure you can take care of yourself if it happens, but then stop worrying. You'll suffer more in imagination than reality.

> It doesn't help that I'm going through a lot in my personal life at the moment too

I think this probably has the majority effect on how you're feeling. Jobs come and go, layoffs happen. I've been laid off and I've been fired, and I've found jobs afterwards. As long as you have a decent bankroll to keep you going through a couple months (easy for me to say as I'm single and have supportive family), I wouldn't worry about THE STATE OF THE WORLD/ECONOMY.

Since around Facebook became a thing, I think we (most of the developers of the world) have been wasting our time and effort in what I would call useless fancy toys: Twitter, Facebook, vine, instagram, tiktok, thousands of saas, millions of npm libraries, crypto, and a long etc.

I love programming but I certainly hate most ofthe tech companies and products that exist nowadays. I’m part of it, though, since it doesn’t pay that bad in this part of the world (not usa).

> We've had a massive influx of new tech talent over the last few years

Very true, colleges have been seeing double-digit growth in applicants of CS majors every year in the past 10+ years, and this year the number of applicants is at least 2x more than last year. That said, I'm not sure about the growth rate of qualified talent. At least 8 out 10 senior engineers who I interviewed could only throw some terms around and draw a few boxes. "Experts" of Apache Beam can't write a simple word count using even pseudo code of Beam's APIs. The team leads from FAANG could talk only about team coordination but not specifics of the tech stacks of their systems. ML experts could throw terms like BERT around but could not explain simple things like the difference between layer normalization and batch normalization, let alone coming up with models to solve specific problems. Experts of distribute system couldn't design a simple stateful system or articulate any distributed algorithm. The list can go on and on.

Given such shortage of true talent, I'd rather worry about whether there will be growth in IT the industry. Without growth opportunities, investment will drop, so will the demand of talent.

> I don't know how many of you relate, but a personal level this last few years has left me quite shaken.

Deep breaths. All industries are cyclic. We've been here before, we'll be here again. From my perspective as a wizened curmudgeon, this is more directly disruptive to tech careers than 2008/9 was. But it's significantly less of an existential disaster than 2001.

It is true, though, that to new entries to the labor market, these things can be unfair. Someone coming out of college last year had a vastly different experience than a very similar candidate trying to get a job right now. And that sucks. But over decades, things even out.

I’m my 35 or so years in the industry it goes through ups and downs. I look at GPT as an evolution of the IDE, which compared to 35 years ago is basically writing the code for you now. But it’s not. GPT can’t from whole cloth develop an entire system, but it can accelerate certain boring stuff that hopefully isn’t your value. The market for labor expands and contracts violently in tech. You’ll be ok. Just love what you do and do what you love, don’t let the anxiety chase you as burn out lies down that path and that’s a hole that’s impossible to fully emerge from unscarred.

You sound a lot like me.

Only I'm a low performer who might have a real chance at getting fired for performance issues.

"In 2021 I remember thinking how tech really proved its worth by so quickly assisting our economies through the pandemic with e-commerce, video conferencing and work from home."

Funny, I attribute that "assistance" to improvements in hardware and networking. Today's commercial software is not great to say the least. And then we have the ridiculous amount of surveillance that comes with it.

Without a doubt, computers and networks are proving their worth. But intermediaries calling themselves "tech" companies I am not so sure. It seems the market, too, is questioning the need for them.

> tools like GPT potentially disrupting our careers on a timescale best viewed on the scale of months.

GPT is cool, and has a lot of potential uses, but don't be scared by the hype.

The biggest impact GPT is going to have on most people's software careers is that everyone will have to include "Prompt engineering" on their resumes in the very near future, and data science/ML folks are going to have to answer a lot more questions about transformers by people who have never heard of "Attention is all you need", even though the deepest they'll have to dive into the subject in practice is a few api calls.

I am with you. My recommendation is to keep a cold head. Invest in yourself and your relationships. Find meaning/balance outside of work.

I’ve been a “developer” since 1996. I’ve seen people prognosticate about the end of the glory days every few years.

If you are talented you will have no problem keeping or landing a new job. The people that have trouble maintaining employment are the ones that are not very good. Tech is about as close to a meritocracy as there is in the US.

There is of course a lot of nepotism and politics but generally if you have talent you will be employed. There is simply too much demand for talented tech people.

The large layoffs are not good but they are course correcting and these companies are still actively hiring despite the billboard layoff announcements.

Its all about interest rates, the rest is irrelevant. ChatGPT is very hyped.

Also, you are not competing with new talent, unless you are entry level.

My assumption is that by next summer, interest rate will go back down to 1.5% (the long term growth based on demographic) and than you will see tech rise again (as it is still the only growth story around).

Nothing like starting a career amidst this chaos

> I guess I should just be grateful that we had a good run while it lasted, but it's hard to think like that when people depend on you to have things figured out.

If you could do a 180 switch this quickly I think you should look inward. The concept that you could be more concerned about the future in 2023 rather than 3 years ago where a novel virus was killing thousands per day would be funny if it wasn't so absurd - consider therapy, because this seems to be an internal issue rather than a problem with the world at large.

Yeah tech workers should unionize. Any effort otherwise is dumb as fuck.

I have watched engineers consistently automate themselves out of a job and didn't even have the foresight to update their resume because they over inflated their own self value to the company.

Hint: You are about as valuable as your tech companies building's custodian crew. Tech companies know their burn rates, why do you think they stay close to campuses like Berkley? Plenty of fresh blood to burn through.

At the end of the day, a union is merely one of the ropes that workers can tug at to maintain leverage.

Doctors don't use unions. They instead artificially limit supply by erecting massive barriers to enter their workforce. This keeps them in demand. Software contrasts this with an open-door policy. On top of that, all white-collar labor jobs barring software involve serious licensing requirements as further gatekeeping.

Lawyers maintain leverage by making sure the it's Lawyers all the way up. No MBAs, people-persons or bean-counters controlling their profession. This means that the workers control important intangibles like customer relationships & hidden information ...both of which make you irreplaceable. Software instead pushes technical people from the stable-and-monetarily-rewarding positions by making the management-track entirely distinct from the working professional (IC). At the same time we obsess over building tools and systems that make everyone replaceable and automate ourselves away.

Immigration is another form of leverage. Tech being majority immigrants, means that they lose all leverage in what they can ask for when the ultimate guillotine is held over their heads. Do tech workers vote as a block on matters of immigration to improve their leverage ? No.

Work culture & pressure to conform can also be a type of leverage. If someone likes being well groomed, then professions that expect you to spend those 30 minutes getting perfectly ready are not cumbersome, it is leisure. Afterwork drinking ensures a good social life, but also ensures that everyone leaves work together at 5. It excludes, yes. But if you fit into that clique, then the conforming is effortless and the leverage comes for free. Consulting & finance are some examples of such businesses.

Tech isn't the only broken business. Restaurants & game design are broken for similar reasons.

Unions have their place, but a nation-wide tech worker union is a logistical impossibility. All too often, other levers are over-looked. Tech has made its bed : "learn to code. be a college drop out. get PMs to do the boring work and let them be promoted faster. I will let a glorified secretary be my manager. we will never put my community's 'legal' immigration priorities over those of the greater social issues I 'facilitating illegal immigration' my tribe asks me to commit to....and so on. No we have to lie in it.

unions are inefficient, because they promote mediocrity (regression to the mean) in terms of talent - and union bosses wield abnormal influence.

> If you work for a company like Amazon, and you don't want to be laid off, the only thing you can do to move the needle is join a union.

If you don't like how one party can make changes to your job without your meaningful input, you should throw in so two parties can make changes to your job without your meaningful input? Also, you should be sure to pay some part of your wages to the second party, even if you don't like what they're up to.

I hardly think FAANG workers make good union members. One is about maximizing personal net worth, other is about making sacrifices for common good.

If you’re good, you’re already looking. If you’re not good or you don’t think you’re good, you’re waiting. Severance, unemployment, etc. Broadly speaking of course, exceptions as always.

Would be crazy to move right now given the way they’ve been handling these layoffs

> Those affected will be notified Mid-April.

Imagine working there right now, that uncertainty must be so stressful, it would be for me.

Most of the studies I can find on Google show that remote employees are more productive, and that management trusts remote employees less, despite more productivity.

Why are companies so interested in RTO, when the data seems to show that remote work is more productive? It seems like traditional management needs new training to sustain remote productivity gains, not that remote work should be discontinued to increase managers' trust in their employees.

The sense that I got is that the whole relocation thing is on case-by-case basis. That is, it's up to your manager to work it out with you and determine whether or not this is a requirement. At least this is what I hear from someone working there. Is this not the case?

Pretty easy call I think. If you've already been protesting / walking out / going on strike - I think you look for a position at another company, avoid the RTO and avoid the stress of the firing question. I think there were up to 500 employees who were protesting Amazon continuing to carry some of the books they carry.

Otherwise if you have a family and are settled somewhere, I'd wait to find out before moving, then either commute during the week or get a temp spot once you know if you are RTO until kids are out of school where you are and you can plan a move more fully.

We are a medium large company (close to 10k employees globally) and the main focus of this year of the data teams is to figure out every possibility to reduce Google Cloud costs.

The savings could be in 7 digits TBH annually. There are so many low hanging fruits no one cares when the day is good. Tables that have no partition expiration that grow into hundreds or even thousands of TBs, buckets with same amount of data that no one looks at, VMs that no service uses, large clusters well above their load (e.g. only 20% used maximum -- and a full replica too), very bad ETL pipelines that cost hundreds of bucks EVERY RUN, very costly queries generated by Looker dashboards EVERY view...there are just too many.

cloud computings darker secret is armies of overworked sysadmins and SRE's toiling in obscurity through exhausting oncall hours behind the scenes to keep everything running despite these sorts of cuts and mountains of tech debt.. anyone whos worked for a hosting provider can attest.

This is a "you can write bad code in any language" paradigm. Doing computing efficiently takes skill, whether one does it in the cloud or on prem. Cloud solved a few common pain points and, at times of startup / tech boom, had a meteoric rise.

But now many of the companies that moved to the cloud are hitting different challenges and are stuck in a setup that is pretty expensive to maintain. I am not expecting the death of the cloud computing, but that pendulum will likely swing back a little as the companies experiment with other options. I think a company that can help medium sized businesses optimize their compute setup with a mix of on prem and multi-provider cloud will do well. My 2c.

Cloud computing is a massive rip off. From my experience with start ups, they were using things like AWS, because otherwise the investors would be reluctant to put their money in. As in they were afraid of dedicated hosting and something that small business wouldn't be able to handle.

So for instance company would have their hosting costs upped from £500 a month (dedicated servers) to something like £5000, so that they could "scale up", while their dedicated servers could have easily served almost any traffic thrown at them and be more responsive. They have actually never reached the level of traffic that this old set up wouldn't be able to handle, but investors were always saying "what if we get sudden surge of users" which has never materialised. But then it was their money so nobody objected.

I can see that now that hosting costs in the cloud have become ridiculous, cash strapped smaller businesses will be looking for savings and the cloud is quite an obvious area to look for cuts.

Cloud computing can cost 3-5x self-managing with the open source versions of the standardized cloud tools that are sold to us.

One big difference working against the cloud is the same thing that worked in it's favour 15 years ago. We don't always remember why we just adopted the cloud. Linux networking at times had scaling issues, and virtualization and linux was not where it is now.

It's astounding how much more a $5 VPS can do. Imagine the medium end. Self-managed hosting tools have come so far to handle production quality, it doesn't even feel fair that it is not more well known. Whether it's Proxmox, or others, it is pretty close to most things out there. Making a tool cloud compatible, but cloud agnostic is one way to avoid a lot of technical debt (assuming it's not created another way).

It doesn't have to be for everyone, but demand is probably slowing in part because of this. In a recession cost efficiency is everything.

At the time I remember that shocking me. Now, years later I think it's probably the right approach. Cut deeply ONCE and be done with it, these multiple rounds of cuts are totally demoralising and destroy goodwill, causing good people who weren't redundant to start looking for a new gig.

This is not the first time, it won't be the last time. The next hype round is only a matter of time because rich people need somewhere to put their money.

Until you solve the problem of middle management status being based on the number of people you manage, you will keep getting bloated organizations. Until an organization figures out a better way to manage their dependencies on each other, every new thing an organization wants to do will require an n log n number of people. (In bad organizations, it's n^2.)

Organizations are just committing on "not growing" in terms of product offerings in the next period of time. The stock market, after some time, will reward growth and the cycle will start again.

Sure, but these things come and go. I would not be surprised if in 12-24 months Amazon has more engineers than they do today by a significant margin.

And "in tech" is right. At my current company, we have more PMs than we do developers. This leads to a really poor feedback look where the PMs are trying to justify their jobs, so they "look busy" and start generating cruft that is probably not important (like changing text without really a great reason, sure maybe it is "polish" but ... there's real things to do and it distracts the engineers).

We don't need more PMs than we have engineers!

People have short memories. Big companies have always had boom/bust cycles.

Tech will always be the star of the investment show. No other industry can or will be able to deliver so cheap and fast.

>Maybe when the inflation starts dying down faster + the AI craze will continue to even greater heights then we'll see it coming back in full swing.

We might never see it "back in full swing", the same way cobblers never did came back in full swing...

https://novum.substack.com/p/what-if-worldview-zero-interest...

The employees are shareholders, what do you think an RSU is?

(More technically, they aren't shareholders until it vests, but they are long the equity)

> Seems the halcyon days in tech are coming to an end pretty quickly.

Did I wake back up this morning in November 2001?

Let's hope the shareholders get scared anyway.

Getting recruiter email is the same as getting spam, everyone gets it.

FANG still has a very low (<1%) success rate.

So, don't assume that just because you got a recruiter email you'd be qualified to make it

Amazon recruiters especially were hounding most of the people I know working in tech.

Ditto.

Amazon, Meta, Google were contacting people all over LinkedIn etc and everyone had an interview prep kit that you needed to study in order to get in.

The FOMO was real but it felt so weird and robotic. I rejected all of them. One meta recruiter was even offended when I said no to them. The extra € were not worth the hassle and I’m glad I didn’t going there FAANG rat race in the past 2 years.

Management of big tech companies are like sheep, one goes BAAAA and they all follow suit

Just to be clear, they're not laying off 9,000 engineers.

There is always a need for more engineers. But at a company this size there is going to be parts that are more efficient than others.

Is this just affecting US workers?

There seem to be non-stop AI hype since 10 years ago, but it does not seem to be a field that has high barrier of entry.

This time it does seem quite useful, but I think in a few years it will be commoditized and offered from all major cloud vendors, probably even get to choose the models.

Please do not jynx the state of things. The last thing we all need right now is another economic downturn event.

big if

At least according to Amazon,

"Some may ask why we didn’t announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple months ago. The short answer is that not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall; and rather than rush through these assessments without the appropriate diligence, we chose to share these decisions as we’ve made them so people had the information as soon as possible."

(From the announcement.)

My philosophy on multiple rounds (which I'm not attributing to big techs):

1) Any business can tolerate a 5-20% layoff without loss to business continuity.

2) A 50% layoff results in losing critical knowledge about how to keep the business working.

3) Therefore, if you want to lose 50% of your employees, it makes sense to do it in rounds.

I can give similar logic for larger layoffs too, mostly having to do with impact on employee perception. If I'm in a business who has layoffs every 3 months, I will be sending out resumes to more stable places, to the extent they exist.

The way it was worded—it sounds like a failure to predict how many roles they wanted to eliminate. I’m sure they also wanted to hedge—wait things out and see if conditions changed.

HN seems to have this idea that layoffs are one and done

who is to say the reason why? maybe Andy Jassey just went for a long walk and came back and decided 9k more were out the door

for all you know he may want 25k more gone and is just figuring out the how/when

They're only now (when this was decided, maybe a month or 2 ago) figuring out the natural attrition in the next couple of years will be extremely close to 0%, down from 15% or even higher

A cynical person might suggest that the 1st round was intended to tank morale and trigger mass resignations.

So far, probably 80% of these roles have been non-engineering (wrt to all tech layoffs, not Amazon specifically).

So these were probably just non-engineering people from other parts of the economy.

Companies have been hand-wringing about the tech labor shortage for the last 10 years. People went to school and got degrees in a job sector they thought would be pretty safe. Supply/demand.

Just one data point, but I recently talked to a guy that bounces between being a mortgage broker and a tech worker. When the housing business is booming he switches to mortgage work, then when that slows down he jumps back into technology. I think he said he was in some kind of pre-sales role in tech.

Now that they're both slow at the same time, I'm not sure what he's planning.

Silicon Valley cloud and SaaS applications have been devouring an entire ecosystem of in-house and on-prem IT, small line-of-business software vendors, etc.

Attrition plays a role too, if you hire expecting 20% attrition and attrition comes in at 5% you have more employees than you budgeted.

They'll be back. People do not forget how they were treated and given other options will not want to work there anymore.

Amazon had a lot of trouble hiring during a 'normal' market.

> 1. The management has so completely screwed up that they don't deserve a job.

Yes and no? It feels a bit silly to look at things from a results perspective instead of a process one. Management everywhere was spending money to grow as fast as possible. Reality hit (and whether or not you think this reality was predictable is up to you--but I'd like to see if any money was put where your convictions were) and now these research/growth projects need to be cut down. For many, it was the correct decision at the time given the information they had at the time.

Until laws are put into place to stop the boom/bust cycle the people being hit are always going to be the labourers.

> The management has so completely screwed up that they don't deserve a job.

These companies aren't employing fortune tellers, no one really knew what the future held when the pandemic hit. It was extremely reasonable to think that there was a chance that big tech's market size would massively increase. Even if that chance was only 10% the correct management decision is hiring as if it will happen and then laying people off in the case it doesn't, because catching up is hard, but firing people is easy.

Interest rates have increased. Thus, the full cost of a project that takes some time to complete before generating revenue has increased. Thus, some projects are no longer a profitable endeaver

Software companies have a ridiculous amount of elasticity. Look at ebay and yahoo.

I totally buy the 35 hour thing, but I don't think these companies really have a reason to care. They can push workers to the breaking point to extract whatever diminished returns at no additional cost, then "manage out" the resulting burned-out husks and replace them with fresh meat. With a side of ageism in hiring to ensure that you're getting the freshest, least-distracted minds as grist for your CRUD app mill, it's win-win. Another win is that by focusing on attrition rather than sustainable retention, you can lag inflation in your compensation since you only have to match it at offer time.

The problem isn’t with people being inefficient beyond 35 hours.

The problem is with the large number of people who don’t even put in a serious 10h on the job.

On the other hand, YouTube seems to be doing virtually nothing to improve theor live streaming experience (UI) and increase their market share.

Why do people say "overpaid" so often?

Google is massively profitable. That money has to go somewhere. Why not the workers?

Google famously underpays as it leverages it's name. Startups can't really compete on total compensation because so much is tied to equity which can be made liquid in the case of big tech. At the same time, startups don't want to give away their equity and are fairly conservative about it. I don't see this changing. The current situation will resolve itself in 1-2 yrs and we will be back again.

If you can’t compete with the market rates, then maybe you underpaid your developers?

If your business can’t “buy” the supplies needed for your products - in this case development labor - and sell them at a cost where you can have a sustainable business, then you don’t have a good business model.

> Are there that many good-paying jobs remaining within the tech industry that they can re-shuffle to?

For FAANG-level engineering salaries, the answer is largely no, perhaps save some very specific areas like finance or extremely hot AI prospects.

There is going to be a broad leveling of engineering salaries in my opinion. The engineer with 8-10 years experience making north of 500k at FAANGs is largely going away. Of course, a big part of that is due to equity values not skyrocketing every year. And of course with FAANG-level salaries going down, lots of other companies will feel less pressure to compete.

For engineers, I think a large number of those who were laid off will have difficulty replacing their level of salary for some time. I think that the past 10-ish years, with rock bottom interest rates, were really a "once in a lifetime" chance for non-managerial employees to make as much compensation as they did (again, broadly).

I got laid off late January and was able to find a job within a month. I've got a senior title and 6.5 years of experience.

Like most US tech workers, I was getting paid comfortably, but nowhere near the level of FAANG/fintech/top startups. I took a small pay increase with this new job.

I've got friends who were part of the FAANG layoffs who have been struggling because they only want to work at FAANG or top tier fintech/startups. That said, they are also not trying too hard due to generous severance.

> I've heard stories of recruiters who were seeing 1 resume per week now seeing 300 resumes per week, but I'm not noticing any sentiment of widespread panic on HN or even Reddit.

I can tell you that candidate expectations have changed a lot in recent months.

For a while we had a lot of candidates applying who wanted to stretch the interview process out to 2-3 months so they could shop around, compare offers, then negotiate up as much as they could. Candidates would frequently disappear from the interview pipeline or go weeks between following up.

Now that quality of resumes we receive has increased dramatically. Applicants are much more responsive and are making it clear that they're willing to do anything, as opposed to holding out for their dream job.

Meanwhile my employer is celebrating the latest salary comp data showing that industry-wide compensation has declined sharply.

There are still jobs out there, but it's no longer easy to put in a little effort and find a good job. It's now a competition.

I'm indeed panicking and haven't lost my job, yet, let's see in 3 weeks. I never worked at a FAANG and it terrifies me that if I'm out there I will be competing with people with big names on their resumes. This news coupled with the AI news of the past weeks is making me think about what other profession this forever developer can do to pay the bills.

I took the black pill. Maybe I can find wisdom in past professions' cataclysms, like ice harvesters and milk delivery.

I'd be curious to see how many of these layoffs are coders - I know given the scale of the layoffs the numbers in engineering affected can't be small even if the percentage is, but anecdotally I've only heard of HR layoffs among friends (anecdata isn't data but I'm an engineer so I know relatively fewer HR folk overall).

Fwiw those I do know that've been laid off have gone travelling/career break (severance helps here) or pivoted (all from HR, none from engineering).

250,000 tech workers impacted sounds like a lot, but this is less than what the companies hired during the covid job boom; this can be simply (a step towards) a reversion to a more normal state of the tech employment.

Anecdotally, my employer in telco consulting is hiring dedicated coders - first time I've seen that in this industry. We may finally be seeing a diffusion of programmers into the wider economy after the high tech companies spent some time monopolizing them.

Most people are still in their severance period. Expect panic in the next couple of quarters.

Allegedly there are 750K open positions companies are trying to fill. The unemployment rate in tech jobs is apparently 1.8%.

There are lots of tech openings these days in non tech businesses. Of course these don’t pay the top of the market salaries.

Started testing the waters of the job market last week. Still employed, not FAANG, but senior at a well known startup that is still healthy despite conditions.

I don’t look at LinkedIn much most of the time but I do try to connect with most of the people I work with, and I am nice to recruiters. I generally rely on my network and recruiter outreach for most of my jobs, can’t remember the last time I did a cold application.

For the past few years there’s been a layer of bottom feeder recruiters who were terrible about phone and LinkedIn spam. They made previous job hunts unpleasant. Nowhere to be found this time around, wonder where those people went.

The quality roles are still there but maybe 25-50% less abundant in terms of cold outreach from recruiters.

For someone still employed this translates to a very manageable interviewing pace that probably leads to better results in the end.

If I were unemployed I might be more anxious since you probably can’t do 3-4 interviews a day without hustling quite a bit. The pace reminds me a lot of my experience interviewing for mid-level roles a few years back, before I made senior.

Overall take, the bottom has definitely not dropped out of the market. Yes FAANG comp is less available than it used to be, but the just-below level isn’t too hard to find, and even the FAANGs are still hiring in key areas. I expect a ramp-up late this year/early next once the operational cracks start to show from layoffs and attrition.

It's only an issue for people who insist they are 'worth' FAANG jobs. Outside of the big players theres ample opportunities.

> Are people finding placement?

LMAO no. Admittedly I have been out of the job hunting circus for a decade, but the number of positions I've applied for in the past few months that have resulted in a first interview is laughable. Recruiters are still useless and such an active waste of my time I don't even reply to them any more.

I'm seemingly having better luck these days getting freelance contracts through non-standard avenues (but I'm holding off from celebrating as I'm still negotiating and haven't signed anyone just yet)

What we are seeing is a rebalancing. The super high-paying FAANG jobs are becoming scarcer, but there is more talent for tier 2, and tier 3 employers and startups. Many companies struggled to hire in recent years, often relying on contracting, offshoring, etc.

The company I work for, a tier 2 or 3 company for tech, depending on your perspective is still hiring, although mostly not in the U.S. But if more U.S. talent becomes available at more reasonable rates, we might do more hiring here.

Anecdotally, the folks I'm seeing on LN most impacted by the layoffs seem to be more on the senior/higher paid side of things, probably more folks that chose the tech track than people management (but I'm seeing those too).

Seems like companies are focusing on cutting folks that don't contribute (code, reports, something tangible) directly to revenue streams.

I regularly interview and am continuing to grab offers every couple weeks. Just make sure to bypass the application portal with inMails from LinkedIn as the recruiters are lazy and will just send you in rather than read through the pile and you are fine.

I suspect anyone with a decent network is fine. If you are applying through portals though, the competition is steep.

> Are people finding placement?

A year ago I submitted to one job post and got a full round of interviews from it, which ultimately I decided wasn't a fit.

Over the past two weeks I've submitted my resume to 80+ jobs, and so far have had a handful of declines and no interviews.

So, yeah, it's a different market than it was, for sure.

A possible reason is that the layoffs are localized to the tech industry so far, but not all (perhaps even most?) tech workers don't work in the tech industry - they do tech work for other industries such as construction, finance, health etc, either embedded directly or for companies that specialize in providing tech services to them. So until those industries are impacted by the recession they won't see the same layoffs.

Tech employees and coders/engineers are not equivalent. It was not 100k engineers that got fired it was a lot of admin staff and sales people.

Its still super easy to find jobs. I know several people laid off at Twitter and they are swamped with recruiter calls.

All the tech layoffs in the last few months make up only a small fraction of the net new additions to the industry post 2020. These companies still have way more employees today than they did in late 2019. We have a long way to go before we will start to see significant hiring (and paycheck) impacts.

What would panic look like to you?

> the number impacted in the past year seems to be between 100-250,000 tech employees

That's because companies announce layoffs but they usually don't announce mass hiring.

While cloud sectors are laying off, healthcare and defense are hiring tons right now

The era of the $600k (and more via stock value, if you joined 2-3 years or more before the bubble popped) line manager is over.

There is still plenty of work to find, but it all depends on how much people built their lives around their income level

My company is still hiring L5+ faang type engineers at the normal pay ranges, no major changes. Growth has been cut back, but is still happening.

PXT is their tech team supporting HR for Amazon. It grew a ton of the last 5+ years, but from the outside looking in it appears to be mainly empire building. The major initiatives I was aware of from my time there never seem to have been completed.

Last I had heard, advertising is still a disaster at Amazon and Twitch still costs more to run than it brings in.

Pxt from what I gathered is like HR

I think Amazon's time is coming to an end. AWS is the last bastion. The rest has started to rot.

Yeah, not to mention it ignores the questions of "how many teams still haven't finished" and "is it the same management that made the excess growth that is looking to explain where they should be?"

That last is huge, btw. Leadership setup a disaster to require a few layoffs. I'm assuming leadership is having to take on some pain, as well?

The layoffs will continue until performance improves.

3 Layoffs now.

Maybe, but then again Apple hasn't announced any layoffs. So if there was collusion, did no one invite them?

If "tough times" is BS people will start new companies and benefit from all this talent being released and everyone is going to be happy again.

It is definitely to keep investors happy because it comes with RTO, which is another thing investors seem to like.

AZ could have very well gone nearly 100% remote for SDEs and slash the office costs without messing up teams and deadlines.

Those are the same thing! Investors care about profits, which are dented by over-hiring.

The stock price is down 2.5% today. The investors didn't like it for some reason.

make a phone bezel 23% thiner. making the dynamic island 15% wider. and call it the most advanced iPhone ever sold in stores

and add another $15B of revenue growth

Apple has John Giannandrea who was previously in charge of Search and AI at Google.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Giannandrea

Apple has a tendency to keep things close to the vest, but I am sure they have a plan. If you look at the M1 and M2, they have insane memory bandwidth that can be quite useful for running large ml models.

It would be interesting if Apple released models that can locally on your Mac or iPhone and bypass the whole only run these models in the cloud model of the other companies.

I wonder if Google will seize the opportunity to leverage their inhouse AI expertise to outmaneuver the competition. In theory having inhouse AI should mean they can more quickly iterate ideas, unless they truly are the corporate wasteland people believe them to be.

...and an army of armed robots to keep the desperate and angry mobs of unemployed away.

Okay, I'll bite. What does this mean?

We have found one more thing, besides comedy, which AI's actually do better than humans, if you consider CxO's to be human.

For every one of these layoff posts, look at the number of employees hired during covid and subtract what was added. Maybe add normal growth during those years assuming covid never happened and you'll land roughly where the numbers should be.

These are all symptoms of the end of 'cheap' money essentially. World's been running on QE for a long time now, and most millennials and Gen Z folks (myself included) haven't seen/lived in a world without QE.

This is all regression toward the mean. The next couple years should be interesting.

Massive over-hiring - headcount for lots of these companies more or less doubled in the last 2-3 years.

I doubt it's the end of tech growth long term but one of the main reasons that these companies are laying people off isn't that they need to (even if some departments are overstaffed), it's that the market is demanding it and they care about their share price. Once the market decides that it's fine to hire like crazy and grow again, they'll do huge rounds of hiring.

I see IBM I feel the need to comment.

IBM has to be shittiest company I had to interact with in a professional setting. We have an AS400 iSeries. It ran the company for many years but now we are building a lot of apps around it in C#/.net/blazor.

So, in order to use entity framework with iSeries one needs a data provider. Most of the data providers are generally "free", for example if you have SQL, Oracle, MySql, PostgresSQL you don't have to pay anything. BUT not IBM.

We tried getting a license for the iSeries data provider, and I literally gave up and said fuck them I will just use OleDb and write queries by hand. First, nobody could answer which license we needed for our use case. Then, I received a trial license, which didn't work....I spend days snooping around to realize it was for the wrong version of .Net core. IBM support was clueless. I finally received the correct version, but the instructions for the install had a link to a dead URL.

IBM forums were full of IBM employees responding with "sent you a DM" when people were asking questions....followed by many replies "i have the same problem can you share the answer publicly"....followed by "sent you a DM".

Seriously screw IBM, awful company.

it's stack ranking but with whole teams.

But did they let those people go?

Also, great way to make the layoffs the fault of the team that's being laid off.

One of our LPs is ownership. Jassy sure isn't owning anything here.

What are they supposed to do?

If they announce early, people are waiting for doom.

If they don't announce early, people are caught off guard.

You’re not wrong, but only in the long run. How much value has been built in the past 10 years? 20? 30?

If you can accurately predict exactly what your customers want 30 years from now, you can take the approach you’ve mentioned. Otherwise you’re just waiting for someone to eat your lunch.

Tech is not nearly stable enough yet. Too much value to add still.

If they can get funding, which is not easy to come by. Was speaking with someone working at one of the top 5 VC's and they are yet to fund a new company this year. Most of the work is dealing with those already in trouble or working with companies in later funding rounds.