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Comment by gustavus | Hacker News Reader

I really question that, id believe that 300,000 jobs from tech companies have been lost, but 40% of all tech jobs. Sounds like nonsense, especially since the source is an outplacement company.

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You can't believe 40% of tech jobs were lost when the IT bubble popped? This is about 2001 and not now.

I find it hard to believe. That means that there were only 750,000 jobs to begin with. Yet, according to BLS, there were 3.45 million IT jobs in 2001. It is not clear if that figure is before or after the layoffs in question, but either way the 40% doesn't work.

IT != "Tech jobs", one is a superset of the other. A good chunk of the entire "IT industry" is going to be tech support, computer repair, technical sales/analysts, etc. Not the kind of jobs you are thinking of when people say "tech jobs" (jobs at FAANG and the like). It doesn't include the dozens of thousands of on-prem IT people at schools and the like.

Yes, you are right that tech jobs encompass even more than IT, but that means the total number of tech jobs was even larger than 3.45 million. Yet the original claim was that there were only ~750,000 tech jobs in total across the USA. That remains hard to believe.

I, like the commenter that set the context, can find it easier to believe that 300,000 jobs were lost at tech companies, representing 40% of jobs at tech companies. No doubt, the vast majority of tech work happens outside of tech companies – probably doubly so back then when it was the norm to do everything in-house rather than outsource a lot of the work to tech companies like we see today. But the comment I replied to discounts that notion, so here we are...

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