7 ms·

A bad day for tech: 31k jobs slashed (2001)

38 points by frfl 3y ago

thelastgallon 3y ago
"More than 300,000 tech jobs, nearly 40% of the U.S. total, have been eliminated in the first half of this year"
- gustavus 3y ago
  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.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - Jensson 3y ago
    You can't believe 40% of tech jobs were lost when the IT bubble popped? This is about 2001 and not now.
    - randomdata 3y ago
      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.
      - deaddodo 3y ago
        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.
        randomdata 3y ago
        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...
gedy 3y ago
Man had just started my career the year before and these companies hit close to home, Alcatel was one of our customers, JDS Uniphase was where we got our slimy C?O. Amazingly I was never laid off, but that was a rough 2 years seeing stock go from $160 to $0.20 a share, losing 80% people due to layoffs, wheeling office furniture into the parking lot, etc.
- pbourke 3y ago
  Nortel had a similar trajectory. Just prior to the crash it represented 1/3 of the Toronto Stock Exchange by market cap. It essentially went to null and took 10’s of thousands of jobs, the wealth of hundreds of thousands of small investors and Ottawa’s tech sector with it.
blakesterz 3y ago
Ah, the good old days. I was hired for my first job in tech at a new .com startup in February of 2000. Everything was awesome and nothing could possibly go wrong! The NASDAQ peaked the next month. It wasn't obvious everything was falling apart for quite a while. It was an interesting few years.
- llampx 3y ago
  > Everything was awesome and nothing could possibly go wrong! Sounds a little like the soft landing scenario that's currently making the rounds, as the stock market keeps making new highs.
alephnerd 3y ago
At least the software is a much more established in 2023 than it was in 2001. Every company will have a dedicated Software team. It might not be sexy stuff, but it's still an important part of an organization. In the early 2000s, plenty of organizations weren't as digitized yet.
- fm2606 3y ago
  I like helping employees do their job more efficiently with custom software. One of my favorite places was working part time for an environmental lab that rolled their own LIMS software and just about everything else. People were so grateful for helping them solve their problems. If the software isn't tied directly to a companies bottom line things are much more chill, in my limited experience anyway. EDIT: on -> own
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    > If the software isn't tied directly to a companies bottom line things are much more chill Yep. But conversely, the pay also tends to be lower, and there is a chance operations can get offshored (eg. Cummins or JPMC's internal systems)
HankB99 3y ago
That's when my son graduated college. A couple years earlier one of his friends was offered a job in IT rather than finish his degree. (e.g. no need to graduate, we'll hire you now.) I suggested that was a short term strategy and that lack of a degree could result in lack of mobility later. He graduated at a time when companies were rescinding offers to hire and even trying to claw back hiring bonuses. It was a long time before he found work in the field and I suspect that it has affected the trajectory of his career to this day.
- TremendousJudge 3y ago
  How did his friend fare, with no degree but two years of experience?
  - neogodless 3y ago
    See my comment above - not the person in question (to my knowledge), but also no degree and hit 2001 with 2 years experience. I'm not "hacker news material" - i.e. no Big Tech or Startup experience. Just slowly, steadily worked my way up in salary mostly at small-ish (6-100 employees) software / marketing agencies or doing similar work.
  - HankB99 3y ago
    I don't recall what path his friend took. As for my advice, I don't regret it at all. But the one thing that might have made a difference was that I could afford to put our sons through college (public school, UIUC) so neither graduated with debt.
- alexpetralia 3y ago
  That is sad to hear, but hopefully you do not feel too much regret over it. 9 times out of 10, your advice would fare better, but you happened to roll the die in an unlucky period.
  - randomdata 3y ago
    > 9 times out of 10, your advice would fare better Not according to the data. There is absolutely no period where general college attainment has shown to improve mobility when as compared to equivalent people without college attainment. What the data does show is a tendency for those with the capability to successfully complete college to have greater mobility when as compared to dissimilar people (i.e. those hindered by disabilities), but it is faulty to attribute that to college. Clearly it is the life challenges that hold people back. It is not the lack of a degree that keeps the down syndrome kid from being considered 'management material'. There is a stronger case to be made for high school attainment, but even that is no doubt confounded by the rise of industrialization showing up at the same time, providing new mobility opportunities. The meaningful gains in high school attainment we have seen over the last 20 years have not translated to improved mobility for that subset of the population.
cwbrandsma 3y ago
ah yes, the "irrational exuberance" period, as termed by Alan Greenspan, when investors were poring money into anything that was labeled a '.com'. Companies were renaming themselves to include the '.com' in their official name. I also remember a satire article about a startup with the idea of turning everyone's monitor yellow. "Think Yellow". Anyway, I was also a casualty. I spend about 6 months looking for full time work.
dclowd9901 3y ago
> Thursday’s moves from a variety of tech titans, which already are slogging through the worst year in the industry’s history, caused analysts to wonder whether the carnage would get even worse and when it would come to an end. Written July 27th, 2001. Talk about statements that age like milk.
bane 3y ago
I remember this time. I worked for a small b2b startup at the time and one of my coworkers left to take a better offer at another company that week. The company he went to laid him and everybody else off that same week. He ended up in the local newspaper in one of those "oh well" shrug-emoji articles. Since we were bootstrapped we ended up lasting a little bit longer, but pay freezes and such eventually killed the company and forced them to sell. When the pay freezes hit, I was able to use a personal connection to get another position at lower pay, but in a virtually recession proof industry which brought in extraordinarily valuable income and stability at the time (my wife and I were basically Ramen poor during this). The job market took 3 or 4 years to rebound and I personally didn't go back into startups until around 2007. I remember seeing job posting for "entry level with x years in y technology" where x > 10 and y technology hadn't even existed 3 years prior. Very very scary across the entire tech world. The cuts last year and this year are huge, but don't have quite the same exploding bubble feeling from back then. Still, it's no fun to be on the receiving end of them.
- deaddodo 3y ago
  > I remember seeing job posting for "entry level with x years in y technology" where x > 10 and y technology hadn't even existed 3 years prior. This was common with Golang and is common with Rust now. Also, a ton of Elixir/Phoenix jobs want unrealistic experience in the field.
  - llampx 3y ago
    I'm a Millenial. This was my reality starting out.
  - commune_quest 3y ago
    We must be looking at the same openings. I am constantly surprised at the expectation that applicants have >1 or 2 years of production experience with Elixir & Phoenix (seemingly excluding Erlang from that experience as well). Where are all these entry level Elixir jobs that these companies are banking their applicants having? It's hard enough just to find an FP position (around here anyway), but sure, let's make it even more specific.
focusedone 3y ago
This happened while I was in high school. My dad worked in IT at a company that actually still exists. He even survived the layoffs, though with a series of dramatic pay cuts. It was such a shock going from a pretty sweet gig to the terror of sudden destitution. He was so lucky to survive but was suddenly sleeping in his cube and living in constant fear of being the next let go. I think he was the only one of his coworker/friends to survive the layoffs at his company. Dad would describe sitting in his cube when a team of security people would get off the elevator. Everyone was terrified, not knowing who they were coming for. If it was you, they would physically remove you from your cube and haul you down to HR and that was it. One of your coworkers would pack your things into a box that you'd be handed on the way out. That happened to dozens (hundreds?) early in the process, and continued regularly for a couple of years. I think he felt trapped at the time - there obviously weren't many tech jobs hiring, so losing a job could mean long-term unemployment or even changing careers after 20 years in the field. Our family situation sucked, but we were extremely fortunate compared to many of those around us. Every time another mass-layoff event happens, like we've seen so many of lately, I think of those times and grieve for the people going through that now. Not really any wisdom or insight to share on this. I just really hate the series of events and decisions which lead to hardworking people seeing their lives upended like this.
- focusedone 3y ago
  Also the founder / CEO of the company bought a private island around this time. It was featured in a magazine and, looking at the photos, it felt so bizarre and frustrating that, while so many suffered, some at the company seemed to do quite well.
- supportengineer 3y ago
  I’ve been working in the valley over 25 years. This happens to me every five years or so.
  - metabro 3y ago
    If you’ve been working in the valley for 25 years then you should have substantial savings to not fear a payoff every 5 years.
whoswho 3y ago
Walked into a friend’s house one day. His dad had a nice home office, hardwood desks with lots of bookshelf space and literature on just about everything to do with IT at the time. He wasn’t there that week. He was doing long-haul trucking and would be back home in 5 days or some such.
ylee 3y ago
When I graduated from Columbia in 1999, I interviewed and got offers at various tech startups, but entry-level jobs on the "PM track" for those without a CS/engineering degree didn't formally exist at the likes of Microsoft or Yahoo as far as I know. I had a technical background, but was almost entirely self-taught, and had no interest in writing code for money anyway. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36027171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36027171> Of my offers I chose an investment banking job where I worked with tech companies. Thank goodness for that; I got to participate in the dotcom bubble without being directly swept up in its popping, and saw the Valley immediately post-bubble collapse. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34732772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34732772>

38 points by frfl 3y ago

thelastgallon 3y ago

"More than 300,000 tech jobs, nearly 40% of the U.S. total, have been eliminated in the first half of this year"

gustavus 3y ago
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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Jensson 3y ago
  You can't believe 40% of tech jobs were lost when the IT bubble popped? This is about 2001 and not now.
  - randomdata 3y ago
    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.
    - deaddodo 3y ago
      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.
      - randomdata 3y ago
        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...

gedy 3y ago

Man had just started my career the year before and these companies hit close to home, Alcatel was one of our customers, JDS Uniphase was where we got our slimy C?O. Amazingly I was never laid off, but that was a rough 2 years seeing stock go from $160 to $0.20 a share, losing 80% people due to layoffs, wheeling office furniture into the parking lot, etc.

pbourke 3y ago
Nortel had a similar trajectory. Just prior to the crash it represented 1/3 of the Toronto Stock Exchange by market cap. It essentially went to null and took 10’s of thousands of jobs, the wealth of hundreds of thousands of small investors and Ottawa’s tech sector with it.

blakesterz 3y ago

Ah, the good old days. I was hired for my first job in tech at a new .com startup in February of 2000. Everything was awesome and nothing could possibly go wrong! The NASDAQ peaked the next month. It wasn't obvious everything was falling apart for quite a while. It was an interesting few years.

llampx 3y ago
> Everything was awesome and nothing could possibly go wrong! Sounds a little like the soft landing scenario that's currently making the rounds, as the stock market keeps making new highs.

alephnerd 3y ago

At least the software is a much more established in 2023 than it was in 2001. Every company will have a dedicated Software team. It might not be sexy stuff, but it's still an important part of an organization. In the early 2000s, plenty of organizations weren't as digitized yet.

fm2606 3y ago
I like helping employees do their job more efficiently with custom software. One of my favorite places was working part time for an environmental lab that rolled their own LIMS software and just about everything else. People were so grateful for helping them solve their problems. If the software isn't tied directly to a companies bottom line things are much more chill, in my limited experience anyway. EDIT: on -> own
- alephnerd 3y ago
  > If the software isn't tied directly to a companies bottom line things are much more chill Yep. But conversely, the pay also tends to be lower, and there is a chance operations can get offshored (eg. Cummins or JPMC's internal systems)

HankB99 3y ago

That's when my son graduated college. A couple years earlier one of his friends was offered a job in IT rather than finish his degree. (e.g. no need to graduate, we'll hire you now.) I suggested that was a short term strategy and that lack of a degree could result in lack of mobility later. He graduated at a time when companies were rescinding offers to hire and even trying to claw back hiring bonuses. It was a long time before he found work in the field and I suspect that it has affected the trajectory of his career to this day.

TremendousJudge 3y ago
How did his friend fare, with no degree but two years of experience?
- neogodless 3y ago
  See my comment above - not the person in question (to my knowledge), but also no degree and hit 2001 with 2 years experience. I'm not "hacker news material" - i.e. no Big Tech or Startup experience. Just slowly, steadily worked my way up in salary mostly at small-ish (6-100 employees) software / marketing agencies or doing similar work.
- HankB99 3y ago
  I don't recall what path his friend took. As for my advice, I don't regret it at all. But the one thing that might have made a difference was that I could afford to put our sons through college (public school, UIUC) so neither graduated with debt.
alexpetralia 3y ago
That is sad to hear, but hopefully you do not feel too much regret over it. 9 times out of 10, your advice would fare better, but you happened to roll the die in an unlucky period.
- randomdata 3y ago
  > 9 times out of 10, your advice would fare better Not according to the data. There is absolutely no period where general college attainment has shown to improve mobility when as compared to equivalent people without college attainment. What the data does show is a tendency for those with the capability to successfully complete college to have greater mobility when as compared to dissimilar people (i.e. those hindered by disabilities), but it is faulty to attribute that to college. Clearly it is the life challenges that hold people back. It is not the lack of a degree that keeps the down syndrome kid from being considered 'management material'. There is a stronger case to be made for high school attainment, but even that is no doubt confounded by the rise of industrialization showing up at the same time, providing new mobility opportunities. The meaningful gains in high school attainment we have seen over the last 20 years have not translated to improved mobility for that subset of the population.

cwbrandsma 3y ago

ah yes, the "irrational exuberance" period, as termed by Alan Greenspan, when investors were poring money into anything that was labeled a '.com'. Companies were renaming themselves to include the '.com' in their official name. I also remember a satire article about a startup with the idea of turning everyone's monitor yellow. "Think Yellow". Anyway, I was also a casualty. I spend about 6 months looking for full time work.

dclowd9901 3y ago

> Thursday’s moves from a variety of tech titans, which already are slogging through the worst year in the industry’s history, caused analysts to wonder whether the carnage would get even worse and when it would come to an end. Written July 27th, 2001. Talk about statements that age like milk.

bane 3y ago

I remember this time. I worked for a small b2b startup at the time and one of my coworkers left to take a better offer at another company that week. The company he went to laid him and everybody else off that same week. He ended up in the local newspaper in one of those "oh well" shrug-emoji articles. Since we were bootstrapped we ended up lasting a little bit longer, but pay freezes and such eventually killed the company and forced them to sell. When the pay freezes hit, I was able to use a personal connection to get another position at lower pay, but in a virtually recession proof industry which brought in extraordinarily valuable income and stability at the time (my wife and I were basically Ramen poor during this). The job market took 3 or 4 years to rebound and I personally didn't go back into startups until around 2007. I remember seeing job posting for "entry level with x years in y technology" where x > 10 and y technology hadn't even existed 3 years prior. Very very scary across the entire tech world. The cuts last year and this year are huge, but don't have quite the same exploding bubble feeling from back then. Still, it's no fun to be on the receiving end of them.

deaddodo 3y ago
> I remember seeing job posting for "entry level with x years in y technology" where x > 10 and y technology hadn't even existed 3 years prior. This was common with Golang and is common with Rust now. Also, a ton of Elixir/Phoenix jobs want unrealistic experience in the field.
- llampx 3y ago
  I'm a Millenial. This was my reality starting out.
- commune_quest 3y ago
  We must be looking at the same openings. I am constantly surprised at the expectation that applicants have >1 or 2 years of production experience with Elixir & Phoenix (seemingly excluding Erlang from that experience as well). Where are all these entry level Elixir jobs that these companies are banking their applicants having? It's hard enough just to find an FP position (around here anyway), but sure, let's make it even more specific.

focusedone 3y ago

This happened while I was in high school. My dad worked in IT at a company that actually still exists. He even survived the layoffs, though with a series of dramatic pay cuts. It was such a shock going from a pretty sweet gig to the terror of sudden destitution. He was so lucky to survive but was suddenly sleeping in his cube and living in constant fear of being the next let go. I think he was the only one of his coworker/friends to survive the layoffs at his company. Dad would describe sitting in his cube when a team of security people would get off the elevator. Everyone was terrified, not knowing who they were coming for. If it was you, they would physically remove you from your cube and haul you down to HR and that was it. One of your coworkers would pack your things into a box that you'd be handed on the way out. That happened to dozens (hundreds?) early in the process, and continued regularly for a couple of years. I think he felt trapped at the time - there obviously weren't many tech jobs hiring, so losing a job could mean long-term unemployment or even changing careers after 20 years in the field. Our family situation sucked, but we were extremely fortunate compared to many of those around us. Every time another mass-layoff event happens, like we've seen so many of lately, I think of those times and grieve for the people going through that now. Not really any wisdom or insight to share on this. I just really hate the series of events and decisions which lead to hardworking people seeing their lives upended like this.

focusedone 3y ago
Also the founder / CEO of the company bought a private island around this time. It was featured in a magazine and, looking at the photos, it felt so bizarre and frustrating that, while so many suffered, some at the company seemed to do quite well.
supportengineer 3y ago
I’ve been working in the valley over 25 years. This happens to me every five years or so.
- metabro 3y ago
  If you’ve been working in the valley for 25 years then you should have substantial savings to not fear a payoff every 5 years.

whoswho 3y ago

Walked into a friend’s house one day. His dad had a nice home office, hardwood desks with lots of bookshelf space and literature on just about everything to do with IT at the time. He wasn’t there that week. He was doing long-haul trucking and would be back home in 5 days or some such.

ylee 3y ago

When I graduated from Columbia in 1999, I interviewed and got offers at various tech startups, but entry-level jobs on the "PM track" for those without a CS/engineering degree didn't formally exist at the likes of Microsoft or Yahoo as far as I know. I had a technical background, but was almost entirely self-taught, and had no interest in writing code for money anyway. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36027171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36027171> Of my offers I chose an investment banking job where I worked with tech companies. Thank goodness for that; I got to participate in the dotcom bubble without being directly swept up in its popping, and saw the Valley immediately post-bubble collapse. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34732772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34732772>