6 ms·

Tech Layoffs for 2016 Projected to Be Deep

65 points by velodrome 10y ago

askafriend 10y ago
I hear there is gold out West near California. Pack your bags boys and girls, we're going West!
Bombthecat 10y ago
And the rest will be replaced by people from India and China... Also, the neat line, we at.. Will help.. Hm
askyourmother 10y ago
Earlier rounds of job losses were often replaced with offshoring and classic wage arbitrage, but this time feels different. A lot of the companies are cutting jobs, without the expectation to replace them (at all). I think ageism will play a part in the selection process, but not always because of the age directly, rather the older staff may have larger pay, pension and benefits costs.
- YZF 10y ago
  All these companies are under pressure to grow their revenue. Guess what- they won't be able to do this without hiring. While some companies are reducing their workforce others are growing, some of this is because market share is switching. Traditional business losing to the cloud for example. There is more software work today than at any point in history. This is only going one way. Until AI will be able to develop software at least. With respect to age while there are pockets of ageism I think most of the big players and some of the smaller don't have a problem with anyone's age. There are still a lot of companies who can't find enough people regardless of age and I don't think there's a huge salary differential between someone really good in their late 20's to 30's and someone really good who is older. So there's really no economic incentive for ageism. Yes, you can hire someone out of school for cheaper but you need to invest a lot more in them and then they disappear for a more lucrative job...
  - askyourmother 10y ago
    A certain firm got rid of all their expensive staff, who must just sit there all day, being expensive, probably not doing much, except for you know - having about 200 years worth of experience on the core clearing system that was a critical part of the system. A small part was offshored, but most roles cut. Sure enough, soon enough, said important system fails, offshore reduced size team without the benefit of experience on this 40year mainframe app, could not solve it. I know one of devs there who made a phenomenal day rate there fixing that mess. Big firms are greedy and dumb. IT is a cost centre too them, every tech employee is a moocher sucking cash that could be used in yet another stock buy back to try and keep the stock price high a bit longer so the board can cash out and run.
princetontiger 10y ago
I think it's important to always have "ideas" handy just in case things go awry at work. We're likely in a shallow recession right now. 260,000 layoffs in the the industry can send ripple effects to other parts of the economy. That's a ton of high paying jobs gone. Not enough to create any major recession, but enough to be felt around the communities.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
nfriedly 10y ago
I just narrowly avoided getting booted out of IBM Watson just because a new manager 6 layers above me wants everyone to move and I can't. This was announced as co-locating, not a layoff, but it had about the same effect for many of my co-workers. I only got a temporary exception because my managers and teammates fought so hard to keep me, and I'm still looking at this same situation in a few months. I'm personally not very worried - I got one immediate no-interview offer from a former boss and about 6 other folks who were interested in hiring me. And if I suddenly can't find any work in tech, I can always go back to laying tile. But this is going to suck for a lot of people. Amusingly, I think I had a better feeling of job security working at startups than I do at IBM now.
- bogomipz 10y ago
  Is that even legal to fire someone if they don't agree to move? If that wasn't part of some hiring agreement I would imagine you would likely have some legal recourse there. Wow that's crappy.
  - nfriedly 10y ago
    I'm not a lawyer, but I believe it is legal. Crappy, but legal. There was also a strong possibility of transferring to a position in some other part of IBM, so I wouldn't be fired, just changed roles.
_ph_ 10y ago
When a company is in serious financial trouble, layoffs might be a way of saving it, but outside of emergency, does anyone think that laying off larger parts of the workforce is a good idea long term? Next thing is, we read about shortages of skilled engineers...
- YZF 10y ago
  At the very least it means the company isn't able to grow. It also means it's a poorly managed business. A lot of the businesses laying people off aren't even in financial trouble. Some of them have piles of cash in the bank and are profitable. They just lost what it takes to enter new markets and grow their business. The sad thing is that the stock market will often reward this strategy because in the short term the cost goes down and the revenue decline lags. The good thing is that it's a healthy process that leads to new businesses being created that are better than the old ones.
- tryitnow 10y ago
  It depends. There's some business units that just don't make any sense to keep funding. They may have become uncompetitive, technology could have made their business model obsolete. There's a whole host of reasons why it would be smart to lay off a big part of the workforce. Mostly, it just comes down to getting a better return on invested capital elsewhere.
blue_dinner 10y ago
This is why I started my own company. All of my developer friends that told me I was stupid 5 years ago are now on their 5th or more job (and are scared about the next round of layoffs). While I've had continued stability. I would rather not get pushed out of my own industry for being too old or demanding too much pay. I think I would be pretty depressed if a snot-nosed kid out of college was managing me. As a side effect, my company can now hire all of the new cheap labor that will be poured into the marketplace after the next bust.
- askyourmother 10y ago
  A colleague at a previous firm took his severance pay, and opened a coffee shop, right in the tech area. He does very well now, even worried about their jobs, everyone still seems to buy expensive coffee!
  - enraged_camel 10y ago
    >>He does very well now Does he really? That's very surprising. In a previous life, coffee shops used to be a big part of my client-base[1]. Out of all the coffee shop owners I knew, I didn't know a single one who wasn't worried about putting food on the table. It's a very cut-throat business with lots of competition, and even if you're located in an expensive area, the margins tend to be razor-thin. [1]I learned an important lesson from the experience: it is a horrible idea to have clients with little or no disposable income.
    - askyourmother 10y ago
      In London, the coffee scene in shoreditch/the city does very very well.
      - petra 10y ago
        Doesn't the costa coffee machines with their claim to quality strongly affect that business ?
takno 10y ago
This article paints a very bleak figure. In particular it ignores that in any given year around 2.5% of the workforce will retire, and retiring a year early isn't a massive hardship if you are getting severance, so 5% cuts can be easily accommodated (although obviously that makes things more challenging for me entrants to the industry). The other thing is that these numbers appear to be international, and are therefore a tiny drop in the ocean of the international IT workforce.
itg 10y ago
While at the same time they beg Congress to expand the cap on H1B's...
- spriggan3 10y ago
  You need to understand, Facebook,Google and co have hard time hiring engineers in US ... the ones they have to pay fairly ...
- disbelief 10y ago
  Pretty sure these numbers are international, not limited to the US? Though I'm sure there is a sizeable percentage in the US. Also doesn't really mention what sorts of roles are getting cut, just that they're skewing towards older employees. My guess is that there will be a lot of non-technical people under the knife here.
petra 10y ago
I wonder: with capital still highly available for the right opportunity, Deep learning technologies have become highly effective across varied domains and can be a relatively simple way to do many complex things, and 260K engineers are being laid of and VC's talk abut an AI boom - how all this will affect the economy ?
samfisher83 10y ago
We have other articles about some engineer with not much experience getting 250k. These stories seem contradictory.
- mifreewil 10y ago
  I think I know which articles you are referring to, and I think the cited figure in those articles of 250k were BS. The real salary I believe was a base of 120k + estimated value of stock options (probably inflated) + benefits.
jweir 10y ago
The article is written by an accelerator that is seeking the laid off to do business with them: http://1m1m.sramanamitra.com http://1m1m.sramanamitra.com It is a PR piece not journalism.
- tryitnow 10y ago
  You're being generous calling it PR. It's pretty much just an advertisement. To be fair, that's pretty clear upfront. My main problem is that they don't provide any references for all these layoff numbers. That would have been nice. Of course, they didn't do that probably because the numbers are BS.
  - velodrome 10y ago
    The article is referencing: http://www.informationweek.com/strategic-cio/10-top-tech-companies-poised-for-massive-layoffs/d/d-id/1325015 http://www.informationweek.com/strategic-cio/10-top-tech-com...
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - Tiksi 10y ago
    > You're being generous calling it PR. It's pretty much just an advertisement. Isn't PR just a subset of advertisement?
bogomipz 10y ago
So lets put this in perspective - Inc.com is reposting what someone named "Sramana Mitra" wrote on her Linkedin post quoting someone named Dawn Kawamoto who reported in Business Week about something she heard from "one Wall Street analyst." Brilliant. Garbage all the way down.
- askafriend 10y ago
  My god, its worse than I thought...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

65 points by velodrome 10y ago

askafriend 10y ago

I hear there is gold out West near California. Pack your bags boys and girls, we're going West!

Bombthecat 10y ago

And the rest will be replaced by people from India and China... Also, the neat line, we at.. Will help.. Hm

askyourmother 10y ago

Earlier rounds of job losses were often replaced with offshoring and classic wage arbitrage, but this time feels different. A lot of the companies are cutting jobs, without the expectation to replace them (at all). I think ageism will play a part in the selection process, but not always because of the age directly, rather the older staff may have larger pay, pension and benefits costs.

YZF 10y ago
All these companies are under pressure to grow their revenue. Guess what- they won't be able to do this without hiring. While some companies are reducing their workforce others are growing, some of this is because market share is switching. Traditional business losing to the cloud for example. There is more software work today than at any point in history. This is only going one way. Until AI will be able to develop software at least. With respect to age while there are pockets of ageism I think most of the big players and some of the smaller don't have a problem with anyone's age. There are still a lot of companies who can't find enough people regardless of age and I don't think there's a huge salary differential between someone really good in their late 20's to 30's and someone really good who is older. So there's really no economic incentive for ageism. Yes, you can hire someone out of school for cheaper but you need to invest a lot more in them and then they disappear for a more lucrative job...
- askyourmother 10y ago
  A certain firm got rid of all their expensive staff, who must just sit there all day, being expensive, probably not doing much, except for you know - having about 200 years worth of experience on the core clearing system that was a critical part of the system. A small part was offshored, but most roles cut. Sure enough, soon enough, said important system fails, offshore reduced size team without the benefit of experience on this 40year mainframe app, could not solve it. I know one of devs there who made a phenomenal day rate there fixing that mess. Big firms are greedy and dumb. IT is a cost centre too them, every tech employee is a moocher sucking cash that could be used in yet another stock buy back to try and keep the stock price high a bit longer so the board can cash out and run.

princetontiger 10y ago

I think it's important to always have "ideas" handy just in case things go awry at work. We're likely in a shallow recession right now. 260,000 layoffs in the the industry can send ripple effects to other parts of the economy. That's a ton of high paying jobs gone. Not enough to create any major recession, but enough to be felt around the communities.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

nfriedly 10y ago

I just narrowly avoided getting booted out of IBM Watson just because a new manager 6 layers above me wants everyone to move and I can't. This was announced as co-locating, not a layoff, but it had about the same effect for many of my co-workers. I only got a temporary exception because my managers and teammates fought so hard to keep me, and I'm still looking at this same situation in a few months. I'm personally not very worried - I got one immediate no-interview offer from a former boss and about 6 other folks who were interested in hiring me. And if I suddenly can't find any work in tech, I can always go back to laying tile. But this is going to suck for a lot of people. Amusingly, I think I had a better feeling of job security working at startups than I do at IBM now.

bogomipz 10y ago
Is that even legal to fire someone if they don't agree to move? If that wasn't part of some hiring agreement I would imagine you would likely have some legal recourse there. Wow that's crappy.
- nfriedly 10y ago
  I'm not a lawyer, but I believe it is legal. Crappy, but legal. There was also a strong possibility of transferring to a position in some other part of IBM, so I wouldn't be fired, just changed roles.

_ph_ 10y ago

When a company is in serious financial trouble, layoffs might be a way of saving it, but outside of emergency, does anyone think that laying off larger parts of the workforce is a good idea long term? Next thing is, we read about shortages of skilled engineers...

YZF 10y ago
At the very least it means the company isn't able to grow. It also means it's a poorly managed business. A lot of the businesses laying people off aren't even in financial trouble. Some of them have piles of cash in the bank and are profitable. They just lost what it takes to enter new markets and grow their business. The sad thing is that the stock market will often reward this strategy because in the short term the cost goes down and the revenue decline lags. The good thing is that it's a healthy process that leads to new businesses being created that are better than the old ones.
tryitnow 10y ago
It depends. There's some business units that just don't make any sense to keep funding. They may have become uncompetitive, technology could have made their business model obsolete. There's a whole host of reasons why it would be smart to lay off a big part of the workforce. Mostly, it just comes down to getting a better return on invested capital elsewhere.

blue_dinner 10y ago

This is why I started my own company. All of my developer friends that told me I was stupid 5 years ago are now on their 5th or more job (and are scared about the next round of layoffs). While I've had continued stability. I would rather not get pushed out of my own industry for being too old or demanding too much pay. I think I would be pretty depressed if a snot-nosed kid out of college was managing me. As a side effect, my company can now hire all of the new cheap labor that will be poured into the marketplace after the next bust.

askyourmother 10y ago
A colleague at a previous firm took his severance pay, and opened a coffee shop, right in the tech area. He does very well now, even worried about their jobs, everyone still seems to buy expensive coffee!
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  >>He does very well now Does he really? That's very surprising. In a previous life, coffee shops used to be a big part of my client-base[1]. Out of all the coffee shop owners I knew, I didn't know a single one who wasn't worried about putting food on the table. It's a very cut-throat business with lots of competition, and even if you're located in an expensive area, the margins tend to be razor-thin. [1]I learned an important lesson from the experience: it is a horrible idea to have clients with little or no disposable income.
  - askyourmother 10y ago
    In London, the coffee scene in shoreditch/the city does very very well.
    - petra 10y ago
      Doesn't the costa coffee machines with their claim to quality strongly affect that business ?

takno 10y ago

This article paints a very bleak figure. In particular it ignores that in any given year around 2.5% of the workforce will retire, and retiring a year early isn't a massive hardship if you are getting severance, so 5% cuts can be easily accommodated (although obviously that makes things more challenging for me entrants to the industry). The other thing is that these numbers appear to be international, and are therefore a tiny drop in the ocean of the international IT workforce.

itg 10y ago

While at the same time they beg Congress to expand the cap on H1B's...

spriggan3 10y ago
You need to understand, Facebook,Google and co have hard time hiring engineers in US ... the ones they have to pay fairly ...
disbelief 10y ago
Pretty sure these numbers are international, not limited to the US? Though I'm sure there is a sizeable percentage in the US. Also doesn't really mention what sorts of roles are getting cut, just that they're skewing towards older employees. My guess is that there will be a lot of non-technical people under the knife here.

petra 10y ago

I wonder: with capital still highly available for the right opportunity, Deep learning technologies have become highly effective across varied domains and can be a relatively simple way to do many complex things, and 260K engineers are being laid of and VC's talk abut an AI boom - how all this will affect the economy ?

samfisher83 10y ago

We have other articles about some engineer with not much experience getting 250k. These stories seem contradictory.

mifreewil 10y ago
I think I know which articles you are referring to, and I think the cited figure in those articles of 250k were BS. The real salary I believe was a base of 120k + estimated value of stock options (probably inflated) + benefits.

jweir 10y ago

The article is written by an accelerator that is seeking the laid off to do business with them: http://1m1m.sramanamitra.com http://1m1m.sramanamitra.com It is a PR piece not journalism.

tryitnow 10y ago
You're being generous calling it PR. It's pretty much just an advertisement. To be fair, that's pretty clear upfront. My main problem is that they don't provide any references for all these layoff numbers. That would have been nice. Of course, they didn't do that probably because the numbers are BS.
- velodrome 10y ago
  The article is referencing: http://www.informationweek.com/strategic-cio/10-top-tech-companies-poised-for-massive-layoffs/d/d-id/1325015 http://www.informationweek.com/strategic-cio/10-top-tech-com...
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- Tiksi 10y ago
  > You're being generous calling it PR. It's pretty much just an advertisement. Isn't PR just a subset of advertisement?

bogomipz 10y ago

So lets put this in perspective - Inc.com is reposting what someone named "Sramana Mitra" wrote on her Linkedin post quoting someone named Dawn Kawamoto who reported in Business Week about something she heard from "one Wall Street analyst." Brilliant. Garbage all the way down.

askafriend 10y ago
My god, its worse than I thought...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]