
Tech Layoffs for 2016 Projected to Be Deep - velodrome
http://www.inc.com/linkedin/sramana-mitra/tech-layoffs-2016-projected-deep-what-happens-260000-highly-mitra.html
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jweir
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.

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tryitnow
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.

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velodrome
The article is referencing:

[http://www.informationweek.com/strategic-cio/10-top-tech-
com...](http://www.informationweek.com/strategic-cio/10-top-tech-companies-
poised-for-massive-layoffs/d/d-id/1325015)

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nfriedly
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.

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bogomipz
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.

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nfriedly
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.

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blue_dinner
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.

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askyourmother
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!

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enraged_camel
>>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.

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askyourmother
In London, the coffee scene in shoreditch/the city does very very well.

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petra
Doesn't the costa coffee machines with their claim to quality strongly affect
that business ?

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idiocratic
Not in the slightest

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petra
But they have something like 3000 machines in the UK . How do they not impact
the coffee-to-go market at all ?

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willtim
Because the coffee is not as good quality as the smaller independents.

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

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spriggan3
You need to understand, Facebook,Google and co have hard time hiring engineers
in US ... the ones they have to pay fairly ...

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princetontiger
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.

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askyourmother
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
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...

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askyourmother
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.

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bogomipz
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.

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askafriend
My god, its worse than I thought...

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takno
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.

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

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samfisher83
We have other articles about some engineer with not much experience getting
250k. These stories seem contradictory.

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mifreewil
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.

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petra
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 ?

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_ph_
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...

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YZF
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.

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Bombthecat
And the rest will be replaced by people from India and China...

Also, the neat line, we at.. Will help.. Hm

