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Economic downturn and the influence of AI are claiming numerous jobs
- Max-q 3y agoBiggest surprise when reading the article: DocuSign has 7000 employees
- HHC-Hunter 3y agoWas a good meme about this somewhere, how DocuSign was not automated at all and the 7000 employees was so they could scan everything physically.
- adaml_623 3y agoIs there some principle that if everyone has heard of a company and you don't feel you have to explain who they are then they are probably a minimum of X thousand people?
- edejong 3y agoWhatsApp before acquisition had 55 employees and was well known.
- danjac 3y agoIt's apples to oranges comparing different companies with different needs. Some companies may require more non-technical staff for things like legal compliance, or have complex technical requirements that are hidden beneath a simple UI.
- cpursley 3y agoErlang
- YetAnotherNick 3y agoWell while this number is not false, it's highly misleading as they had no intent of earning any profit. And so they outsourced everything to others. Their 2013 expense is $148M for $10M of revenue[1]. They aren't spending $148M on 55 employees for sure. And that doesn't include server cost(which is likely very low due to optimizations). [1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114000047/exhibit991auditedwhatsappi.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114...
- mypalmike 3y agoIn any online discussion of company sizes, someone must mention the furthest outlier in the history of business.
- block_dagger 3y agoInstagram
- oblio 3y agoNeither of those (Whatsapp, Instagram were profitable, far from it. And most companies making billions need thousands of employees, especially software devs need to understand that.
- ctxSw1tch 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bsder 3y agoDocuSign IS NOT A TECH COMPANY. DocuSign is a marketing and sales company. Once you internalize this, their employee numbers make sense. DocuSign makes their money by setting up the network effect of "DocuSign is the de facto standard so you, too, should sign up for DocuSign". This requires legions of salespeople to bribe the representatives of large businesses, governments (national, state, and local), legal associations, etc. to use DocuSign. The fact that DocuSign has a tiny amount of extremely shitty tech to make stuff happen is irrelevant to their business structure.
- silvestrov 3y agoIn other words: the are the Oracle of document signing. There must come some tipping point where DocuSign is so much the standard (like Microsoft Windows) that they no longer need ~7000 sales people.
- WJW 3y agoIf that were true, Microsoft would not need a salesforce because Windows and Office are already so dominant. But MS has about 25k people in the marketing department so I don't think that the connection between dominance and not needing a sales dept is as clear as you suggest.
- dpflan 3y agoWhat other companies have the veneer of being a tech company but really aren’t?
- VBprogrammer 3y agoOracle? Edit: Whoops, just read the sibling comment. Apparently it wasn't just me.
- nvm0n2 3y agoOracle is certainly a software company. If they aren't a tech company, then Microsoft isn't either. Doesn't seem like a useful classification scheme.
- lifestyleguru 3y agoSir this is a base employment number for an American cookie cutter business corporation with executive board members flying circles in private jets between private islands.
- mooreds 3y agoI would have liked if they'd given percentages as well as absolute numbers. A 33% layoff for a 15k size firm is more striking than a 5% layoff at a 100k size firm, though they are the same absolute number.
- namdnay 3y agoDocusig can be used as a legal signing mechanism in nearly every country in the world, as well as supporting enterprise workflows . It doesn’t surprise me in the least that they have this many people, just the support team must be several thousands to deal with that many B2B contracts, and then the legal/compliance teams must be at least several hundred
- raister 3y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20231215014053/https://www.peoplematters.in/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231215014053/https://www.peopl...
- oldpersonintx 3y ago[dead]
- inparen 3y agoThat is around 158,000. How many of them able to get new job ?
- rutierut 3y ago“Widespread impact of AI” I know it’s helping people a lot already but is it actually causing layoffs?
- Zetobal 3y agoThese are opportunity layoffs and everyone who says otherwise is delusional.
- infotainment 3y agoYup, companies realized they could blame nonexistent “adverse macroeconomic conditions” to ditch a bunch of staff with zero bad PR and did it.
- lifestyleguru 3y agoLayoffs might be premature but everyone's LinkedIn news feed says clearly that AI is taking over everything.
- thinkharderdev 3y agoMy (uninformed) guess would be that approximately 0 of these layoffs we because of AI. If anything the recovery in tech stocks partly due to AI hype prevented a lot more layoffs at big tech companies.
- ReptileMan 3y agoJust talked with a friend from VMWare they are to be laid off soon after the acquisition. It went like this - they prohibited usage of chatgpt, but we continue to use it at my team - because the AI won't take my job, but the programmer using AI will do. It is a tremendous force multiplier. It will take time to run trough organization - but if you are not the steamroller you will be the asphalt. And it will destroy a lot of the white collar bullshit jobs.
- pylua 3y agoThe U.S. tax base may implode if that is the case.
- infotainment 3y agoThere should be some kind of legal restrictions against opportunistically laying off thousands of staff for no good reason. Maybe something like, in order to do so, the entire C-suite would be legally required to resign.
- YetAnotherNick 3y agoThe biggest factor why Europe's tech salary is half to one third after accounting for cost of living is regulation. Even after someone works for one year of every one year laid off, the person will earn more in US.
- lifestyleguru 3y agoThe workers in Europe can be fired with equal ease, even in countries like Germany. If the HR and management want one out, one is out. The labour code will only be followed if one is quick enough to hire a lawyer. Is is worth the massive paycut the Europeans are accepting?
- ThePhysicist 3y agoOnce you reach a certain size it's quite complicated to let people go, if you need to fire a large amount of people you need to e.g. work out a social plan, you can't fire performance-based unless people grossly neglect their job responsibilities. For smaller companies with less than a few hundred employees it's easier of course, but once you're in unionized territory firing becomes a process that the management needs to work out with the employee board.
- sausagefeet 3y agoIt is factually true that a company can come to you and claim you are fired and have to leave, however it is illegal. One does not need to be quick with a lawyer. If you are a developer in Sweden, and you have joined the Swedish software engineering union, they will provide you legal support to ensure that you get what the law guarantees you. During the big layoffs this year, they actually waved any prereqs for how long you had to pay dues in the Union to get legal support. The layoffs in Sweden required the company to negotiate with employees for how much money they would accept to leave, in many cases this severance was full salary for a year. I live in Netherlands now and it's the same thing. Yes, a company will make it hard on you but they have no legal status here and will 100% lose going to court. Yes, not everyone has the courage to stand up to their employer, and it may take some time for the legal process to work itself out, and it can be stressful. But the guarantees are there. For myself, as an American who moved to Europe and has stayed, I found my quality of life much better. The reduction in pay has not bothered me one bit.
- cedws 3y agoCapitalism works in dark ways sometimes. I believe these layoffs are almost entirely driven by the stock market. In COVID times everybody had a hiring boom because it looked good to be hiring. So CEOs accelerated hiring, regardless of whether more manpower was actually needed. Now, it looks good to be laying people off in the name of "efficiency", so CEOs initiate layoffs to please the shareholders. There is no actual logic here, whatever pumps the share price is the action taken because CEOs want a fat bonus. Most CEOs are parasites that do very little work other than warp the truth, lean into hypes, and make false promises. All while collecting a salary 100x the average worker's.
- _heimdall 3y agoYou can take this a step further and pin it on market manipulations by the federal reserve rather than the stock market itself. During the pandemic response trillions of dollars werr poured into the system, primarily by giving the new cash to banks at the top of the funnel. This money had to go somewhere and it was largely thrown at tech companies, seeing as they were more likely than other industries to continue to function when the government decided to shut down large portions of our society. Tech companies can only do so much with a huge influx in cash, hiring and stock buy backs are an easy way to burn through the cash and appear to be a healthy and growing company.
- 5350-uiop-1130 3y agoyes, companies buying their own stock with free money to inflate their share prices is the stage of post-value, growth capitalism we're in. and people wonder why apple stock price is constantly so high even though they've been creatively stagnant for almost a decade.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- perch56 3y agoLayoffs.fyi offers a more complete estimation, currently 1179 tech companies w/ layoffs, totaling 261847 employees laid off in 2023.
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoCurious, why are these numbers so different from the officially reported numbers? Is Layoff.fyi re-categorizing some employees as tech, but official numbers have them as 'administrative', or some such thing.
- PedroBatista 3y agoYes most of these layoffs are opportunistic and some are stock market based, but let’s not forget a couple years ago the hiring was too. “Free” money on top of already very cheap money for +10 years and a couple of “new normals/this will never be the same” hype trends made a huge hiring frenzy possible. Now with big boy borrow rates this is both unsustainable and a good opportunity for the C suites to “shine” and get paid.
- oblio 3y agoMy problem with that is that the social contract is completely dead. It used to be that as long as the company was profitable, nobody would get fired. Now we have craziness like Microsoft or Google where they're basically laying people off because profit was 28% instead of 31% or revenue "only" grew by 12% instead of 20% for companies making hundreds of billions of dollars. These companies could readily afford professional reconversions, on the job, for all the people laid off. I understand underperformers, but this is not what's happening. A bean counter is chopping entire departments where the mistakes are made at director or VP level (who, by the way, frequently just get shuffled around) while the recently promoted top performer is just tossed away together with everyone else.
- PedroBatista 3y agoThis has been going on for decades and it's now the integral part of what "being a manager is" as it's taught at schools. Inside these big companies, the forever shuffles, hiring and "losing people" like you're in the war it's part of daily life. It's disgusting from a human perspective, trust me I know, but I still hope this way of doing business is not the best and therefor these companies will rot from the inside and give way of better ones. The problem is the time of a big company is on a different scale of the time of an individual.
- nine_zeros 3y ago> Inside these big companies, the forever shuffles, hiring and "losing people" like you're in the war it's part of daily life. Astute and accurate observation. This is one of the reasons I strongly support unions (or a law that enforces a 2 months notice periods on the employer, no probation allowed). Alternatively, interviews longer than 3 hours are no longer allowed so that people may switch jobs asap. If we want flexible capitalism, we need to ensure that labor gets it's fair protections, just like corporations do.
- hasty_pudding 3y agoIs there a way to measure outsourcing in the tech industry?? I've been in tech a decade and noticed over the years more and more jobs being outsourced or replaced by immigrants to USA. Like many the job postings on adobe's website are for Bangalore for example which wasnt the case 10 years ago. LinkedIn is making a huge push towards Bangalore workforce as well. Is there a way to quantify the transition away from American labor to foreign labor??
- sanderjd 3y agoI know this article is explicitly about the tech industry, but the title of the submission isn't. To put things into a wider perspective, here is about 20 years of seasonally adjusted "total nonfarm layoffs and discharges": https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSLDL https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSLDL. The level through 2023 has been at or a bit below the monthly average level of ~2 million layoffs per month. And here it is for the "Information" subsector: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTU5100LDL https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTU5100LDL. It's much more volatile, but there's a fairly consistent "normal range" between about 20k and 40k, with fairly frequent spikes down to 10k and up to 60k. You can see that the January spike was indeed pretty big (61k), but the rest of the year has been around that "normal range". But there were spikes nearly as big in January 2018 and July 2019 and I don't recall those being particularly notable or commented upon, and they certainly weren't due to AI! My impression is that even within this "Information" subsector, there is a much smaller subsector of "famous tech companies" (or maybe "silicon valley adjacent tech companies") where the layoffs this year really have been notably far above a baseline that has been very close to zero for a very long time. But this is just an impression, as far as I can tell there is no definition for this subsector of the Information subsector, and thus no data tracking it. But I think it is useful to put this in perspective as a phenomenon in a subsector of a subsector of the economy, rather than a trend in the economy as a whole. I think if the story here were really "economic downturn and the influence of AI are claiming numerous jobs", it would be showing up much more broadly than this.
- southernplaces7 3y agoexcellent work in locating these data points for the needed dose of cold water on the clickbait. Thanks.
- rubyfan 3y ago> and they certainly weren't due to AI! TFA has not a single shred of evidence to suggest any one of these have anything to do with AI. It just seems like poor journalism and/or clickbait.
- sanderjd 3y ago
- PopAlongKid 3y agoI kept on waiting for the article to discuss what the authors consider to be an economic downturn... but they never do.
- thecleaner 3y agoHow is unemployment so low then ? Most of these Anerican companies and layoffs happened in US too. Indian startups laying people off is due to less cheap money and faulty business models. Job growth in India is stunted due to economic mismanagement and the fact that the country doesn't do much manufacturing or isnt as important in the global supply chain. And the influence of AI doesnt show up anywhere. Overall a poorly written article.
- AtlasBarfed 3y agoUnemployment figures have been purged of many, many people that just gave up working in COVID. And given the political importance of unemployment figures there is probably a great deal of additional manipulations the government does on them as it approaches election year.
- ianburrell 3y agoThe U6 unemployment rate that counts discouraged workers is way down from the peak of pandemic and back to previous values. All the unemployment numbers are at historically low values. Large numbers of people who left workforce for pandemic have come back.
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- mandyharhalos23 3y ago[dead]