4 ms·

Tech companies are finally firing tech workers

40 points by hotpotamus 4y ago

Jupe 4y ago
Huh. Not a mention of the impact of tax filing changes around R&D. Software development salaries can no longer be treated as expenses and are now treated (somewhat correctly) as depreciable expenses. Not sure this is a root cause, but it certainly must be on the minds of decision makers in tech companies (large and small).
- boringuser2 4y ago
  It seems pretty obvious that Elon Musk acted as ablative armor for tech company layoff criticism and stock devaluation and the confidence snowballed.
  - dajtxx 4y ago
    I think so too. Elon laid waste to Twitter devs & SRE and that has allowed other companies to feel it's ok now. But that's not the whole thing - it sounds like there was massive over-hiring of devs and some madness of trying to stop other companies getting them. What a wasteland. The thing is there is a whole raft of interesting jobs out there that don't involve actively making society worse, so hopefully some devs will move out of this scene and onto something more constructive.
    - late2part 4y ago
      Two thoughts: 1. Twitter works. The cuts are reasonable. 2. I worked with a number of people from (pre-Musk) Twitter. The self entitlement culture the majority of these pre-Musk Twitter people espoused was toxic.
      - btreecat 4y ago
        Define "works?"
        suddenclarity 4y ago
        Site is up and it seems they've launched more features in the last year than the previous 15 years combined.
        boringuser2 4y ago
        Ridiculous. It clearly functions as well as ever.
        btreecat 4y ago
        Right... And the reports documenting increased down time, broken features and spam on the "for you" page are all a false flag operation by the liberal woke mafia to dunk on daddy Elon.
        white_dragon88 4y ago
        You define it cause you seem to be quite confused about what that word should mean.
        btreecat 4y ago
        That's not how making a claim in good faith works buddy.
      - boringuser2 4y ago
        Clearly so, but doesn't it kind of blow open some serious questions -- these companies have been over-hiring and importing direct competition from the third world to our labor, and now they say "lol jk, we didn't need that labor"? Hmm....
- andreareina 4y ago
  Whether it's correct or not depends on the goal. This rule (and others requiring the amortisation of certain expenditures) means that companies need to keep more cash than actually needed for operations. For a change that doesn't even change tax obligations/revenue, just shifts portions of it in time. I'm aware of why amortisation/depreciation exists in the accounting context; I haven't found a rationale for requiring it in taxes in general, or for this case in particular. Especially for things that were paid for with cash.
boringuser2 4y ago
Written by a very smarmy journalist imminently replaceable by the GPT-4 API.
- WeylandYutani 4y ago
  The day AI starts to write software HN will be glorious. Journalists still have social skills I have no idea what tech workers are going to do.
  - musicale 4y ago
    What in particular will give you the greatest joy from this development? What will be the greatest benefit to humanity?
    - dajtxx 4y ago
      AI doesn't sleep so think of how many bugs it can create vs us fleshy blobs every day?
  - btreecat 4y ago
    If I need to, I'd become an electrician. Finding gainful employment isn't difficult when you are over qualified and have spent decades practicing self study. Being a white male with a "normal" name also tends to weight the curve a bit.
    - boringuser2 4y ago
      Weight the curve against you, sure.
      - btreecat 4y ago
        How could I weight it against someone not me if I'm not them?
  - gumballindie 4y ago
tr_user 4y ago
Article cites the twitter layoffs as setting the example that companies can be leaner, but I'm not sure why this journalist didn't ask if it's a good example or a bad one. From the tech side, seems like twitter's reliability problem is a big red flag for why you shouldn't do it.
- dajtxx 4y ago
  Money people don't seem to think like that. And if the company was going to go under due to debt, I guess he's making an effort to save it and make it rise from the ashes?
- kramerger 4y ago
  Twitter has a German court case that may end up with a fine twice their current evaluation. It is a direct consequence of Musk firing the moderation team. And that's for only one issue of the issues many created since Musk took over.
rufus_foreman 4y ago
"So far this year, nearly 20 percent of the 170,000 tech company layoffs were software engineers, even though they made up roughly 14 percent of employees at these companies". Software engineer was the most often laid off job role at 19.3%, recruiter was second at 4.6%. Definitely goes against the sentiment I've seen expressed here that developers are mostly not being affected.
- flappyeagle 4y ago
  Developers are more than 14% or 20% of the salaries paid out. They are not being laid off at a rate that's consummate with their monetary cost
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  Yes, I detect the same sentiment (and it seems like a pretty natural one given the general audience here), but it also seems useful to see some data regarding the situation.
- thomascgalvin 4y ago
  I wonder what proportion of new pandemic hires were also software engineers. I have no data to back this up, but my gut tells me that during the pandemic, many companies over-hired software devs, and this round of right-sizing is correcting that mistake.
- porknubbins 4y ago
  This data is still compatible with the statement “most of the layoffs are not software developers”, most likely is they are being layed off at a similar rate to everyone else and “software developer” is simply the modal role at a tech company. What other category of employee do you have that many of?
  - disgruntledphd2 4y ago
    Sales, generally. Sales scales with n clients whereas software should scale with like n log n or sqrt.
908B64B197 4y ago
First of all, I take with a grain of salt any piece about Facebook or Meta from a traditional media company (Vox belongs to Comcast) because they compete for add revenue and historically Facebook has been better at it. Should be noted that Comcast also competes with Meta for engineering talent. > This represents a stark about-face for a company that, until recently, had been offering outrageous salaries and basically hoarding people in these highly sought-after technical positions. I'm not sure what's the narrative they are trying to push here with the ambiguous term "outrageous" when this comp was mostly tied up to... stock performance! It's good to remember that it's in Comcast's interest to see engineering compensation go down. Meta needed that talent if they were to be able to bring the Metaverse to market (wether it was a success or not). Think about the ground-breaking work by Occulus. The Quest is basically a 10x price reduction for VR hardware between 2010 and now. It's good to remember that most layoffs outside of Meta (who has been pivoting pretty hard) were "tech adjacent" positions [0] [1] [2] [3] [4] > "Additionally, Keum said that Elon Musk, who fired 80 percent of his staff but still has a (sort of) functioning product, has become a sort of inspiration for other tech CEOs, who see his extreme cuts as a way of making their more modest ones seem morally and culturally acceptable. Their stance? "Thank you, Elon Musk, for showing us that it can be done. And thank you Elon Musk for taking the blame," Keum said." Yeah... So far Twitter completely gave up it's API. Rumor has it they lacked the manpower to actually keep it running and it was a last-ditch attempt at getting rid of bots. Same bots who flocked to the platform after the layoffs started since people in charge of mitigating these were fired. Firing abuse and content moderation teams meant there was a lot more unsavory spam on the platform and advertisers didn't want any of it near their brand. Remember the Twitter Blue two days of spam? [5] [6] [0] https://interviewing.io/blog/2022-layoffs-engineers-vs-other-departments https://interviewing.io/blog/2022-layoffs-engineers-vs-other... [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-24/tech-layoffs-are-hitting-diversity-and-inclusion-jobs-hard https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-24/tech-layo... [2] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3690309/about-those-tech-layoff-headlines-most-companies-arent-firing-it-workers.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3690309/about-those-te... [3] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-03-07-do-recent-layoffs-mean-the-tech-talent-crunch-is-over https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-03-0... [4] https://techreport.com/news/3493451/microsoft-layoffs-ethics-and-society-team-fired/ https://techreport.com/news/3493451/microsoft-layoffs-ethics... [5] https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-lost-half-top-advertisers-elon-musk-takeover-report-2022-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-lost-half-top-advert... [6] https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/11/4/23438917/twitter-verifications-blue-check-elon-musk https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/11/4/23438917/twitter-verifi...
alfalfasprout 4y ago
It seems, meta aside, that if anything the bulk of the tech layoffs were in Q3/Q4 last year and started trailing off Q1/Q2 this year. If anything, it seems like other industries are starting to go through this now. With that said, it wouldn't surprise me if things look much better next year. Companies are actually doing quite well despite the fear mongering.
clnq 4y ago
Will their layoffs bring any significant efficiency compared to just letting go of Mark’s pet VR project? I like VR, I think there is a niche in the market for it, and I respect Meta for their technological efforts in this space. But I have a feeling that Meta’s anti-competitive measures like buying up VR companies and hoarding VR talent alone probably cost more than this layoff will save over a decade.
edmundsauto 4y ago
Here’s my metaphor. I’d love critique. A fast growing tech company (meta, Google) is like a garden. You provide as much nourishment and land as possible to see what can grow. From time to time, you need to trim back the weeds, or large yellow leaves, in order to let the desired parts grow.
- bungeonsBaggins 4y ago
  In my experience of layoffs, it's more akin to just digging up a tenth of the garden at random because you don't know what a weed looks like.
martindbp 4y ago
Since lowering people's salaries seems difficult, they essentially have to let people go and eventually hire them back cheaper. $300-400k salaries seem untenable, that's 3-4x what you'd pay for the same talent in Europe, it just does not make sense long term.
- gumballindie 4y ago
  Spoken to recruiters here in europe and they all said that that’s essentially what’s happening in the us.
antipaul 4y ago
If I sum up that chart, I barely get ~40%. (software engineering is “highest”, at 19.3%) What roles are in the 60%??
gumballindie 4y ago
> The rise of AI at work is also a contributing factor Huh? Hope someone will finally put vox out of their misery.

40 points by hotpotamus 4y ago

Jupe 4y ago

Huh. Not a mention of the impact of tax filing changes around R&D. Software development salaries can no longer be treated as expenses and are now treated (somewhat correctly) as depreciable expenses. Not sure this is a root cause, but it certainly must be on the minds of decision makers in tech companies (large and small).

boringuser2 4y ago
It seems pretty obvious that Elon Musk acted as ablative armor for tech company layoff criticism and stock devaluation and the confidence snowballed.
- dajtxx 4y ago
  I think so too. Elon laid waste to Twitter devs & SRE and that has allowed other companies to feel it's ok now. But that's not the whole thing - it sounds like there was massive over-hiring of devs and some madness of trying to stop other companies getting them. What a wasteland. The thing is there is a whole raft of interesting jobs out there that don't involve actively making society worse, so hopefully some devs will move out of this scene and onto something more constructive.
  - late2part 4y ago
    Two thoughts: 1. Twitter works. The cuts are reasonable. 2. I worked with a number of people from (pre-Musk) Twitter. The self entitlement culture the majority of these pre-Musk Twitter people espoused was toxic.
    - btreecat 4y ago
      Define "works?"
      - suddenclarity 4y ago
        Site is up and it seems they've launched more features in the last year than the previous 15 years combined.
      - boringuser2 4y ago
        Ridiculous. It clearly functions as well as ever.
        btreecat 4y ago
        Right... And the reports documenting increased down time, broken features and spam on the "for you" page are all a false flag operation by the liberal woke mafia to dunk on daddy Elon.
      - white_dragon88 4y ago
        You define it cause you seem to be quite confused about what that word should mean.
        btreecat 4y ago
        That's not how making a claim in good faith works buddy.
    - boringuser2 4y ago
      Clearly so, but doesn't it kind of blow open some serious questions -- these companies have been over-hiring and importing direct competition from the third world to our labor, and now they say "lol jk, we didn't need that labor"? Hmm....
andreareina 4y ago
Whether it's correct or not depends on the goal. This rule (and others requiring the amortisation of certain expenditures) means that companies need to keep more cash than actually needed for operations. For a change that doesn't even change tax obligations/revenue, just shifts portions of it in time. I'm aware of why amortisation/depreciation exists in the accounting context; I haven't found a rationale for requiring it in taxes in general, or for this case in particular. Especially for things that were paid for with cash.

boringuser2 4y ago

Written by a very smarmy journalist imminently replaceable by the GPT-4 API.

WeylandYutani 4y ago
The day AI starts to write software HN will be glorious. Journalists still have social skills I have no idea what tech workers are going to do.
- musicale 4y ago
  What in particular will give you the greatest joy from this development? What will be the greatest benefit to humanity?
  - dajtxx 4y ago
    AI doesn't sleep so think of how many bugs it can create vs us fleshy blobs every day?
- btreecat 4y ago
  If I need to, I'd become an electrician. Finding gainful employment isn't difficult when you are over qualified and have spent decades practicing self study. Being a white male with a "normal" name also tends to weight the curve a bit.
  - boringuser2 4y ago
    Weight the curve against you, sure.
    - btreecat 4y ago
      How could I weight it against someone not me if I'm not them?
- gumballindie 4y ago

tr_user 4y ago

Article cites the twitter layoffs as setting the example that companies can be leaner, but I'm not sure why this journalist didn't ask if it's a good example or a bad one. From the tech side, seems like twitter's reliability problem is a big red flag for why you shouldn't do it.

dajtxx 4y ago
Money people don't seem to think like that. And if the company was going to go under due to debt, I guess he's making an effort to save it and make it rise from the ashes?
kramerger 4y ago
Twitter has a German court case that may end up with a fine twice their current evaluation. It is a direct consequence of Musk firing the moderation team. And that's for only one issue of the issues many created since Musk took over.

rufus_foreman 4y ago

"So far this year, nearly 20 percent of the 170,000 tech company layoffs were software engineers, even though they made up roughly 14 percent of employees at these companies". Software engineer was the most often laid off job role at 19.3%, recruiter was second at 4.6%. Definitely goes against the sentiment I've seen expressed here that developers are mostly not being affected.

flappyeagle 4y ago
Developers are more than 14% or 20% of the salaries paid out. They are not being laid off at a rate that's consummate with their monetary cost
hotpotamus 4y ago
Yes, I detect the same sentiment (and it seems like a pretty natural one given the general audience here), but it also seems useful to see some data regarding the situation.
thomascgalvin 4y ago
I wonder what proportion of new pandemic hires were also software engineers. I have no data to back this up, but my gut tells me that during the pandemic, many companies over-hired software devs, and this round of right-sizing is correcting that mistake.
porknubbins 4y ago
This data is still compatible with the statement “most of the layoffs are not software developers”, most likely is they are being layed off at a similar rate to everyone else and “software developer” is simply the modal role at a tech company. What other category of employee do you have that many of?
- disgruntledphd2 4y ago
  Sales, generally. Sales scales with n clients whereas software should scale with like n log n or sqrt.

908B64B197 4y ago

First of all, I take with a grain of salt any piece about Facebook or Meta from a traditional media company (Vox belongs to Comcast) because they compete for add revenue and historically Facebook has been better at it. Should be noted that Comcast also competes with Meta for engineering talent. > This represents a stark about-face for a company that, until recently, had been offering outrageous salaries and basically hoarding people in these highly sought-after technical positions. I'm not sure what's the narrative they are trying to push here with the ambiguous term "outrageous" when this comp was mostly tied up to... stock performance! It's good to remember that it's in Comcast's interest to see engineering compensation go down. Meta needed that talent if they were to be able to bring the Metaverse to market (wether it was a success or not). Think about the ground-breaking work by Occulus. The Quest is basically a 10x price reduction for VR hardware between 2010 and now. It's good to remember that most layoffs outside of Meta (who has been pivoting pretty hard) were "tech adjacent" positions [0] [1] [2] [3] [4] > "Additionally, Keum said that Elon Musk, who fired 80 percent of his staff but still has a (sort of) functioning product, has become a sort of inspiration for other tech CEOs, who see his extreme cuts as a way of making their more modest ones seem morally and culturally acceptable. Their stance? "Thank you, Elon Musk, for showing us that it can be done. And thank you Elon Musk for taking the blame," Keum said." Yeah... So far Twitter completely gave up it's API. Rumor has it they lacked the manpower to actually keep it running and it was a last-ditch attempt at getting rid of bots. Same bots who flocked to the platform after the layoffs started since people in charge of mitigating these were fired. Firing abuse and content moderation teams meant there was a lot more unsavory spam on the platform and advertisers didn't want any of it near their brand. Remember the Twitter Blue two days of spam? [5] [6] [0] https://interviewing.io/blog/2022-layoffs-engineers-vs-other-departments https://interviewing.io/blog/2022-layoffs-engineers-vs-other... [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-24/tech-layoffs-are-hitting-diversity-and-inclusion-jobs-hard https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-24/tech-layo... [2] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3690309/about-those-tech-layoff-headlines-most-companies-arent-firing-it-workers.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3690309/about-those-te... [3] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-03-07-do-recent-layoffs-mean-the-tech-talent-crunch-is-over https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-03-0... [4] https://techreport.com/news/3493451/microsoft-layoffs-ethics-and-society-team-fired/ https://techreport.com/news/3493451/microsoft-layoffs-ethics... [5] https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-lost-half-top-advertisers-elon-musk-takeover-report-2022-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-lost-half-top-advert... [6] https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/11/4/23438917/twitter-verifications-blue-check-elon-musk https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/11/4/23438917/twitter-verifi...

alfalfasprout 4y ago

It seems, meta aside, that if anything the bulk of the tech layoffs were in Q3/Q4 last year and started trailing off Q1/Q2 this year. If anything, it seems like other industries are starting to go through this now. With that said, it wouldn't surprise me if things look much better next year. Companies are actually doing quite well despite the fear mongering.

clnq 4y ago

Will their layoffs bring any significant efficiency compared to just letting go of Mark’s pet VR project? I like VR, I think there is a niche in the market for it, and I respect Meta for their technological efforts in this space. But I have a feeling that Meta’s anti-competitive measures like buying up VR companies and hoarding VR talent alone probably cost more than this layoff will save over a decade.

edmundsauto 4y ago

Here’s my metaphor. I’d love critique. A fast growing tech company (meta, Google) is like a garden. You provide as much nourishment and land as possible to see what can grow. From time to time, you need to trim back the weeds, or large yellow leaves, in order to let the desired parts grow.

bungeonsBaggins 4y ago
In my experience of layoffs, it's more akin to just digging up a tenth of the garden at random because you don't know what a weed looks like.

martindbp 4y ago

Since lowering people's salaries seems difficult, they essentially have to let people go and eventually hire them back cheaper. $300-400k salaries seem untenable, that's 3-4x what you'd pay for the same talent in Europe, it just does not make sense long term.

gumballindie 4y ago
Spoken to recruiters here in europe and they all said that that’s essentially what’s happening in the us.

antipaul 4y ago

If I sum up that chart, I barely get ~40%. (software engineering is “highest”, at 19.3%) What roles are in the 60%??

gumballindie 4y ago

> The rise of AI at work is also a contributing factor Huh? Hope someone will finally put vox out of their misery.