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2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March
- bearjaws 7mo agoAnd Meta has another round coming, soon the only thing left at the company will be data center staff. Apparently 20% to be laid off soon. https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/meta-planning-sweeping-layoffs-ai-costs-mount-2026-03-14/ https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/meta-planning...
- PlanksVariable 7mo agoSurprised it took this long. I feel bad for the employees, but I can’t remember the last success they had. Metaverse, VR, throwing absurd money at AI and for what?
- jameskilton 7mo agoMark Zuckerberg is no longer the kingmaker that he was during Facebook's peak, and he is desperately trying to create the next platform to be the one in power once again. It would be sad if it wasn't so unbelievably destructive to everything it touches.
- abuani 7mo agoCurious to see how they can turn moltbook into a money maker. Do they sell ads to agents?
- csimon80 7mo agoMy guess is data collection. Maybe the data can be used to improve or train agents.
- operatingthetan 7mo agoWasn't it primarily acqui-hire? Meta's AI strategy is what exactly? The best time for them to release a Chat GPT clone was 2 years ago. The second best time is today.
- FartyMcFarter 7mo agoThey have a ChatGPT clone app already, but it's not very good. I tried asking it some technical questions that Gemini can handle just fine, and it quickly started giving false information and contradictions.
- jimbob45 7mo agoLlama should be mentioned in the same conversations that ChatGPT, Claude, and DeepSeek dominate. If only it wasn’t so inaccessible…
- FartyMcFarter 7mo agoThey have an app for it. I think it's as accessible as any of the other models you mentioned. It's just not as good.
- wolvoleo 7mo agoNot so good right now but they haven't released one in a while. Llama 3.1 was pretty great when it came out.
- the_black_hand 7mo agoYeah strategy is weird. PyTorch and llama 1-3 were strong successes. Llama 4 was a dud but that happens sometimes. Google fumbles a few times before Gemini too. What I don’t get is why they didn’t prioritize those projects. They weren’t making money, but it was a solid start and a good way to get a foothold in the game. Instead they’ve gone balls deep in slop bullshit.
- chaostheory 7mo agoIts surveillance business seems to be growing.
- simianwords 7mo agothreads?
- MSFT_Edging 7mo agoyou don't often see screenshots of threads posts on other sites like you do twitter/bluesky.
- nickthegreek 7mo agoSure, but I’d argue that 140m dau, 400m mau is still success.
- 12_throw_away 7mo agoConsidering the overall impact of Threads, those statistics are certainly ... interesting.
- 10xDev 7mo agoIt is somewhat integrated to Instagram with billions of active users. Not saying a whole lot.
- throw-the-towel 7mo agoI do.
- yacin 7mo agoalso just another clear ripoff. they copy, they acquire, but they cannot seem to innovate.
- tim-projects 7mo agoMeta seem fairly innovative. Their r&d labs seem to produce some really cool things. The basic issue is none of it seems to be making any money when it ends up in products and services. Main reason there seems to be that their walled garden approach is tolerated at best. They just aren't very good at it outside of a feed.
- paxys 7mo agoTheir last success was acquiring Instagram in 2012. Every new effort since then has been hemorrhaging money. They get away with it because they have two limitless money faucets in Facebook and Instagram, but their product strategy as a whole has been a disaster.
- ProllyInfamous 7mo agoIt would be incredible to think that Mark Zuckerberg genuinely thought their Metaverse/VR investment was going to be akin to Xerox's bayarea PARC campus (developer of modern networking / GUI &c). I guess both were ultimately profit-negative financial disasters.
- jordanb 7mo agoWatching their demo video was the perfect encapsulation of "this was not made for users" I have ever seen. First of all the idea of hanging out in a digital world with Mark Zuckerberg is so bleak. I can't imagine a worse hang. But other than that, it was all about working in a digital office, being advertised to, etc. They had this scene where one of Zuck's definitely-real friends is excited about "this new street art" on the digital wall that jumps off the wall and they interact with it. Imagine having popup ads that jump up at you when you're walking (gliding?) down the street!
- dasil003 7mo agoIn other words they haven't really pushed the vision forward since the Jaws 19 hologram in Back To The Future 2.
- nradov 7mo agoI guess they read William Gibson's 2007 novel Spook Country and tried to build that. It had virtual street art as a plot device. https://williamgibsonbooks.com/#books https://williamgibsonbooks.com/#books
- schrodinger 7mo agoIt's easy to get caught up in your own hype when you're surrounded entirely by people who always tell you what you want to hear.
- kypro 7mo agoTheir Libra cryptocurrency project is another example.
- nradov 7mo agoThere seems to be slightly less comment spam and pig butchering fake profiles on Facebook lately so maybe that counts as a minor success? It might not look impressive from the outside but it's technically challenging and helps to keep the advertising revenue rolling in.
- oneseventwonine 7mo agoI think their Meta Glasses are genuinely good, great form factor. I mainly use it to take photos or videos and not much their "Meta AI"
- badgersnake 7mo agoIt’s a lobbying firm now isn’t it?
- tinyhouse 7mo agoThat's going to happen in all of big tech (already happening at Amazon and Microsoft). These companies have too many employees. It was never really justified and with AI even more so. I've been in big tech and directors often tell everyone to hire when they can rather when they need. For example, if they know a hiring freeze is coming, they will try to hire as many people as they can before it happens. It's rare to find people in big tech where their incentives align with the company. (and the blame is not always on the people themselves) As for Meta, I give Mark credit for trying, even if he failed so far with all the VR stuff. The main disappointment is about Llama cause it's clearly an execution problem. With Meta's investments in AI throughout the years, not being able to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI is a big failure.
- napolux 7mo agoAI as a real impact or more as an excuse?
- ttul 7mo agoIt’s the business cycle, mostly. During the pandemic, low interest rates drove a boom in risk investing that flowed downhill into tech company balance sheets. Of course everyone used the money to hire lots of developers and engineers - probably more than were needed for the business opportunity they were exploiting. I think AI is being used as an excuse for layoffs rather than the cause. Companies don’t have the cash and times got a bit too rich. This is the cyclical pull back that has been going on for decades.
- PlanksVariable 7mo agoAnd for how many more years are we going to be calling this a post-Covid market correction?
- camdenreslink 7mo agoMany companies really got bloated during COVID. From what I can see online, Meta doubled their number of employees between 2019 and 2022. How long does it take to correct from that amount of hiring?
- dd8601fn 7mo agoSome of these companies have increased headcount since their post-COVID cuts. Some of this has nothing to do with COVID boom numbers. Some are bailing water as fast as they can (Atlassian, et al), some are treading water and betting on future returns from AI (Block), etc.
- joe_mamba 7mo agoIt takes time to correct 10 years of ZIRP, plus COVID overhiring that doubled the headcount of those 10 years in just 2-3. The jig was up when social media like Reddit and tiktok during the pandemic was full of posts with big tech workers gloating about getting hired for six figure salaries to sleep in and play video games at home while putting in 2 hours of work a week, obvious to anyone with two neurons to rub together that it was a too-good-to-be-true unsustainable bubble that's gonna pop and trigger a brutal reset on the job market. Further reinforced with Elon firing 80% of Twitter and the website didn't stop working, reminding big tech CEOs that they can also start looking into trimming the overhiring fat in their back yard, with no operational loss. Reinforce that with wall street rewarding mass layoff with share price going up, contrary to the pandemic rewards of shares going up with over hiring, and you have the perfect storm. AI and the idea of it replacing jobs, has nothing to dow with this, it's just 10 years of ZIRP reawarding every unprofitable bullsit SaaS start-up, and 10 years of "just learn to code bro" where every shoeshine boy became a coder so now tech companies hiring are spoiled for choice. Edit: Oh I forgot, add to that the increased of offshoring to places with cheaper labor thanks to the normalisation of remote work making it an even perfecter(is that a word?) storm on why an average programmer's labor has way less value.
- bwestergard 7mo agoThe framing of this makes it seem like this is a sharp change in trend, but this long-running layoff tracker shows no evidence of this. 2020 and 2023 both had serious layoff spikes, but the 2023 spike trailed off to an asymptote that we're still hovering around. https://layoffs.fyi/ https://layoffs.fyi/
- cyanydeez 7mo agoIf you go into the larger field, the trend since 2021 is overall concerning, particularly if you factor in Trump's desire to just stop reporting: https://www.macrotrends.net/3208/us-layoffs-and-discharges https://www.macrotrends.net/3208/us-layoffs-and-discharges
- corysama 7mo agoAccording to that chart 2021 was anomalously low and it has been linearly returning to normal for the past four years. AFAICT, the general populace is anxious about AI. So, the news knows they can get clicks with “You are right to be afraid. AI bad.” Meanwhile, CEOs know they can get stock boosts by saying “We are so AI we don’t need expenses. Infinite ROI!” Put together we’re getting a ton of scary reporting on what looks like a quite normal business cycle (at least as far as layoffs go). And, everyone being afraid to hire is the only thing actually making it self-fulfilling.
- Forgeties79 7mo agoI wouldn’t call the massive levels of investment by both private equity and municipal/state governments “business as usual.” The sums being thrown down and/or promised are staggering. People/groups that lose are going to lose big.
- phyzix5761 7mo agoThis is missing a lot of data. Companies that I know for a fact are doing mass tech layoffs are not listed here.
- smithcoin 7mo agoCutting layers of bureaucracy not replacing with AI
- doomslayer999 7mo ago[flagged]
- mc32 7mo agoI’m down for that. There are so many “facilitators” in middle management, some really good and quite a few bad ones and many making no difference. I don’t know how people thought they were good positions to hire for. Remember before Covid many a company deadweight showing us the vast amounts of unwork they did at their companies on their YouTube videos? Proudly showing how idle they were? Not all the firings are deadweight but a lot are. There is also a general tightening of budgets and people who are part of dead-end programs that are being let go. When the economy was hotter companies would keep these people to add at the margins; I think now that money is still tight they’re not keeping that luxury.
- jjmarr 7mo agoIn a zero interest rate environment, literally any return on investment justifies spending. If interest rates are 3.8%, the company needs at least a 3.8% return every year on your yearly compensation to justify your job.
- Retric 7mo agoNot if they are compensated during the year. Grocery stores have slim margins, but if you make 10k after selling 1M worth of stock buy turn over that stock 12 times a year that’s ~12% annual ROI not 1%.
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- hirehalai 7mo ago[dead]
- simianwords 7mo agoAI
- gh0stcat 7mo agoAI
- LoganDark 7mo agoAI
- small_model 7mo agoMangers and executives have better tools now to track a tech workers output/performance, they will cut the useless/low performers/in over their head people who were hired during preceding years. A small tech team with proficient intelligent devs augmented with AI can replace 100's of duds.
- davebren 7mo agoNo what happens from using those metrics is that you filter out all the people that care more about doing their job well than gaming metrics. Fraudsters tend to do really well in those situations.
- thway15269037 7mo agoIt's baffling that with current iteration of hype mania all of the lessons about metrics were thrown out of the window. Goodhart's law anyone? All of a sudden all of the terrible, horrifying methods of measuring lines of code, commits, tasks etc. resurfaced, like world was hit with an amnesia meteor.
- genthree 7mo agoMy experience has been that a good small team, even full of people who’d stand no chance in a FAANG interview (fwiw) can outperform at least 5x as many devs in your median bigco, while maintaining a relaxed pace. The reason for this has nothing to do with how productive the devs are per se and everything to do with bloated decision making processes and extremely high communication overhead. “AI” does nothing for that (in fact, I’m seeing integrated suggestions in ticket tracking tools making things spammier and reducing quality of tickets, so if anything, it’s making it worse)
- tayo42 7mo agoUnemployed people, what are you doing?
- mixmastamyk 7mo agoBeing ghosted, hazed, and otherwise abused. No one is hiring at restaurants, etc either. A recession has probably started.
- Loudergood 7mo agoInterviewing 4 times just to get ghosted.
- apatheticonion 7mo agoI was laid off from Atlassian this/last week. Since then I've been playing Satisfactory for 12 hours a day. Crazy thing is, I delivered optimizations that saved 1m USD over the last 12 months, with another optimization in-flight that would save another 1m USD. I thought that was enough to protect me from layoffs/PIPs - I guess no one was counting. AI is just an excuse for layoffs which IMO CEOs are trying to use to recover share prices from the SaaS-pocalypse. Looks like layoffs aren't hitting the same for stock prices as they once were.
- doomslayer999 7mo agoYour problem was that you tried doing work. What you want to do as an employee is make it so they can’t fire you not that you are actually useful.
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- FartyMcFarter 7mo agoHow would you advise making it so they can't fire you?
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- ph4rsikal 7mo agoI think the age of SaaS and Software companies is over. Given by all the overhyped TikTok videos there are lots of roles which are not needed.
- cockballs 7mo ago[flagged]
- doomslayer999 7mo ago[flagged]
- tokyobreakfast 7mo agoNot sure how you empathize with people that built their robot replacements.
- d--b 7mo agoTake with a spoonful of salt. Those trading firms that make these claims have skin in the game.
- whatever1 7mo agoThe money tree is over. Companies now have to pick between gpus and employees. They picked gpus.
- PostOnce 7mo agoLots of different companies argue with the AI for some time before they call me, but they always call me. They'll never be able to explain what they want to the AI, and even if they could, it couldn't solve the problem anyway. Nevertheless I'm not going to be contracting much longer, I'm writing software by hand to compete with the garbage shat out of Claude's VibeCloaca. I already have customers, I just need to ... tune a few things before I scale, so that I don't have any customer support problems at scale. :)
- mancerayder 7mo agoYour contracting business is done because of AI competition, because money is drying, or because you're finding permanent alternatives due to being sick of it? There's more than one way to interpret your message, and I'm curious.
- PostOnce 7mo agoSick to death of it. The work is still there. I can only work so many hours in a day on a contract, but with a product, I can work 3 hours and sell it 200 times, or license it and make money forever. My customers have said to me point blank "I hate SaaS" and paid me anyway. They've said everything is "so easy with GPT and all now", and paid me anyway. I think I have a chance. Maybe I'll be proven wrong and my AI-using competitors will eat my lunch. Or maybe, I'll drown them and Claude in complexity and attention-to-detail. We'll see.
- judahmeek 7mo agoI'd like to learn more about your current contracting process. It sounds like you could use an apprentice to help handle things as a backup plan.
- wek 7mo agoFrom my experience in some large tech firms, you could easily cut 20% of the workers and not see much impact. There is so much bloat, process-people, meetings-people, etc... Even if the cuts aren't from AI, execs will use AI as a reason to make these cuts.
- Esophagus4 7mo agoYep - IME the trick is that fixing a bloated company is 2 parts: laying off bloat, and fixing the bad processes / restructuring the company to not need so much bloat in the first place. I’ve worked at a company that pulled the layoff lever a lot but never did the hard work of investing in fixing the broken stuff… the layoffs actually just made everything worse. If you have a team whose job is to put duct tape on the widget when it leaks, and you lay off most of that team without fixing the widget, your leak gets worse because you have fewer people with duct tape. What you need is find people who can fix the widget, then fire all the duct tape people.
- lamontcg 7mo agoThe duct tape people are generally drowning under all the work they're doing, and they'd be fine to keep doing other productive stuff. There's always going to be duct tape stuff around, and you don't want the people who can actually fix widgets to wind up running around with their hair on fire applying duct tape to keep it running without any time to fix widgets. And when there's too much duct tape jobs going around the widget fixers may take a look at it all and decide they don't get want to get stuck with applying duct tape once all the duct tape appliers are fired, so they just skip to some other job. You're always going to have some duct tape.
- mountainriver 7mo agoEvery big company I’ve worked for has an immense about of bloat. Whole departments that exist just because someone wanted it to exist at some point in time. The health of an organization is often linked in their ability to fire people.
- swarnie 7mo agoMETA rumoured to be purging by Tuesday. Calls locked in.
- derwiki 7mo agoIs that the only reason they announced it early?
- lowsong 7mo agoThere's little to no evidence that companies are actually doing layoffs to focus on "AI-enabled" work. All there is are layoffs because of interest rates and concerns about the economic outlook. Companies using "AI" as a fig leaf justification and people are apparently falling for it.
- dzonga 7mo agoimpact of A.I - reality vs hype reality - companies are choosing to spend money on CAPEX (i.e infrastructure things hoping that they can ride an uncertain wave into the future) and not spend on OPEX (humans) reality - AI agents are not doing human jobs. reality - money | debt is now more expensive. hence if you were spending more of it on OPEX stuff you would rather reduce that reality - more coasting jobs in tech. demand for stuff that still needs to get done is super high - workers just need to get more distributed and not hoarded at the big paying firms
- taxnerd0x 7mo ago[dead]