Something that isn't clear to me is what "tech workers" means and what kind of "tech workers" have been laid off.
Is it backend engineers, operations, UI designers, marketing/HR/management working in tech? Is an accountant a tech worker if they use slick, modern software? Does it matter where they work or who they're working with? What is a "tech company"?
As far as I can tell, it's programmers and adjacent. I am currently hiring for an infrastructure role (sr. network engineer/architect) and it has been miserable, even for remote positions. Certainly don't see an influx of available talent happening in the infrastructure world.
I work on the infrastructure side (as a programmer, there are programmers on that side as well believe it or not) and this has been my experience as well.
The last 10 years or so have seen outsize investment in the product focused roles and comparatively little in infrastructure.
Generally speaking the trend has been "who cares just move it to the cloud" and then proceeding to not hire sufficiently to work on that infrastructure, which then leads to a move to a more expensive more managed version of the cloud, on and on until you are in a really bad spot and find yourself paying out the ass for an MSP.
There are way way fewer people with experience on the infrastructure side now as a result of basically being ignored for a decade, and so pay has been increasing rapidly.
Just go look at the department handling your company network or whatever you've got for infrastructure. Half those people are on deaths door. What's the plan for retirements when everybody new is just being funneled into front end development?
I'm a Sysadmin with some networking certs, and the linkedin messages have started coming in more frequently, and stating (quite good) salaries up front.
So it certainly does not seem like are 100,000 unemployed sysadmins in the job market currently.
I get the feeling it's seen as an unattractive janitorial job which is perhaps why there are so many attempts to re-title the job as Devops or SRE or Platform Engineer or whatever the de jure is.
I suppose if I had to pick my title, I'd just say "Infrastructure Engineer" because that seems to strike the right balance of vague yet fancy enough to put in an email signature. Really it would be "IT Dude (open source focused)".
As much as companies want to seem to believe they can get rid of them, they need someone generalist around who understands how things fit together and can take on the occaisional maintenance task.
Everyone, but in different proportions. Tech-adjacent roles (e.g. tech writers) have been hit much worse than individual contributor SWEs and SREs, but plenty of talented SWEs and SREs have been laid off too.
I never got laid off, but the whole thing left me with a bad taste, so I have decided to go out on my own. Sure, there is risk, however there is also risk being with a large company and the whole 'we are family' culture kool aid is show to be the BS most of us knew it was. Recently we have seen profitable companies drop workers for no reason other than to appease activist investors. Now sure, this is their prerogative, can't argue with that, it's my prerogative to give (or not give) them my time. So just as my own business could fail, so could my position with a corp be liquidated, yet without being able to read the financial tea leafs and see it coming.
At the end of the day though, I am going to regret not trying then I am giving it a go. Right now I am in my thirties and have some flexibility to roll with the punches of capitalism, but that won't be the case when I hit 40/50+ when the one acceptable 'ism that everyone turns a blind eye to starts to playout ; ageism.
> Recently we have seen profitable companies drop workers for no reason other than to appease activist investors. Now sure, this is their prerogative
I blame stock buybacks. Reminder that theyy were illegal untill recently.
And they perform no legitimate function other than being unregulated, tax-evading dividends.
> But in the United States, capital expenditures aren’t accelerating. Instead, new cash is being used to reduce the number of equities available, thus artificially driving up their value. That practice has been exploding. It’s an irresistible temptation, partly because everyone is doing it. Nobody wants to be left out. And the cash is just sitting there, idle, because it’s a rare C suite that has continued to invest in new, creative growth rather than pick the low-hanging fruit of easy money to be made through financial maneuvers. It was a good thing that companies receiving stimulus money to stay in operation during the Covid-19 shutdown have been banned from using it for stock buybacks. But it’s too little too late.
their entire function is to serve as a "tax-evading dividend". I fail to see why there is a difference besides on tax revenue for a buyback vs a dividend. Can you expand on why they are so bad? Would you be equally unhappy if an equal amount was spent as a dividend instead of buyback?
Dividends can only be paid from profits, that have already been taxed.
Stock buysbacks can be leveraged, can be financed with debt and you could use them to raid the company.
They also have different effect on stock price - you pay out dividends, and then market reacts. A human being decides if now your company is more valuable.
When you buyback stock, the effect is purely mechanical - sell orders are closed, and the more expensive sell orders now sell the price - price goes up in milliseconds, without any human decisionmaking.
If you paid 1 billion in dividends, it will not raise price as much as spending 1 billion on shate buybacks.
> Right now I am in my thirties and have some flexibility to roll with the punches of capitalism, but that won't be the case when I hit 40/50+ when the one acceptable 'ism that everyone turns a blind eye to starts to playout ; ageism.
There have been studies which put the average age of successful founders in their mid-40s. We romanticize the kid in college making something happen, but the reality is that people need experience to see problems worth solving.
>There have been studies which put the average age of successful founders in their mid-40s.
There have also been statistics which put the average percentage of succesful founders among attempted founders at 0.0001% (number pull out of my ass, but the gist is: most startups fail).
So, this is not as reassuring as it sounds, as it amounts to something like:
"You might be fired at mid-40s under an IT sector that discriminates against hiring older developers, but don't worry: you can always start your own startup with odds of it succeeding not that different to winning the lottery".
That number seems excessive. There are a lot of numbers out there but the most frequent one seems to be 90% of startups fail. It should be remembered that this is also why people say "fail fast", if your business is going to fail it's better to get it over with quickly so you can iterate on the next idea. That's the second insight, you don't just get 1 shot especially in tech where the startup costs are so low.
I think the message is getting garbled. The person doing a startup is in their 30s and wasn't fired. The next response was someone offering assurance that even 40 isn't too late in response to their concern that it was "now or never".
I don't think we're advising any particular person, we're just talking about the potential for a dev to do a startup at any point in their life. Obviously if someone is going to attempt a startup they should know their own situation which includes knowing you have enough money and the inclination to go into business for yourself. Whether the 10% would be higher or lower if everyone did it we can't really know. A lot of people that have great ideas and can execute them well probably never attempt to go out on their own, same for the opposite.
Oh yeah. Take it from me. I'm 60, and ran into this, five years ago, when I was looking for work.
As far as startups go, I would have been absolutely ideal for a risky startup, as I didn't need the money, and was willing to work cheap, if the project interested me, and take chances (and work hard). I am also skilled in a gazillion different aspects of shipping software. I've shipped software all my life (Since I was 25 or so).
All I have been doing, is shipping software. All my adult life. Deliverable has been my life's labor.
I'm also used to shepherding a project through its entire lifecycle; from napkin sketch to shrinkwrap and beyond. That usually takes years, for most halfway ambitious projects. Requires a lot of patience. Lots of boring stuff, too.
But, you know, gray hair, and all...
So, nowadays, I work for free, with folks that can't afford folks like me. I've been working on a fairly ambitious project (backend and frontend), for the last couple of years. It should work nicely.
If I were you, I would make as much money as I can working for a big tech company (e.g. gigantic monopolistic company with too much money on their hands). When you're 40/50+, you'll see what your options are.
Do we have numbers on what percentage of laid off "tech workers" are programmers vs IT, management, hr, product, design, scrum masters, marketing, sales, accounting, philanthropy, etc?
> and those useless HR departments staffed by those who can't do real work
As written by a guy who is:
> author, reporter, editor, blogger and columnist
So he just writes about stuff others are doing. Would that be real work then?
There seems to be an incredible arrogance in the tech community (and especially among devs) that only devs are real tech workers. That all these other roles like HR, legal, marketing, recruitment and management are just fluff and everything would be better and more efficient without them. This stuff is short sighted and wrong.
As a developer, do you want to write employment contracts? Do you want to think of benefits packages? Do you want to make sure the WiFi network is functioning correctly? You you want to change the ink cartridges on the printers? You you want to write down list of keywords for ad campaigns? Do you want to sit through sessions with investors who want to know everything about a product they hardly understand?
No, you don't and all these people exist because you don't have to all that stuff. They exist because they're good at handling those things while a dev is good at writing code. Are they annoying sometimes? Sure. Are there some people in those roles who don't add much value? Probably, but I've seen plenty of devs who didn't add much value.
Why do discussions in dev communities keep discounting all the layoff because "it's probably just recruitment"? These are still people who lost their jobs and need to find other jobs and their lives aren't worth less because the don't push code.
>Why do discussions in dev communities keep discounting all the layoff because "it's probably just recruitment"?
because while it is true that these are people who are also important devs in analyzing their own precarity will feel that their situation is not so unstable if it is not devs getting laid off, or if devs get laid off they get jobs quickly again.
I've dug holes with hand tools and I've been the IT guy getting managed by a team of different types of managers, so I can say in defense of those municipal workers that I couldn't dig a hole for 8 hours straight - it's more of a relay marathon than a sprint. But yes, I've been on calls with managers that basically boil down to, "which peon can we find to do this work?", to which I'd say, "you're talking to him". Didn't stop me from getting laid off though.
Other than the meme illustrating the article, I'd say there is nothing in any way whatsoever at all relevant on this very old, drowned on clichês, disconnected, and somewhat pointless, rant.
I wonder what the industry attrition rate is. How many move to another tech company, and how many move on to a new career? This boom is old enough that a large portion of people who got in at the start out of college (or by skipping college) should be in or approaching their 30s where people start reevaluating their priorities.
ChatGPT makes it incredibly easy for juniors to become more productive but also makes it incredibly easy for experienced older devs to move between technologies, reskill and remain relevant.
Looks like all bets are off we simply cannot say much about attrition, what was true 5 years ago won't be true 10 years from now.
We actually have very little idea what the job market will look like in general 10 years from now.
I am interested in the attrition rate from Big Tech to traditional tech (such as enterprise software at banks or government). This will probably be a very hard adjustment for many in terms of salary, tech stack, benefits, work hours, culture,... But I still think many will prefer it over leaving tech all together., since as you said they wouldn't have learnt any other discipline if it was their first job out of college.
I think hard to compare in the abstract due to huge level of variance, probably if you working at palantir, uber or amazon you are working longer hours than say if you are working for apple, google or microsoft.
Almost agree, but even banks there is huge variance, if you work in operations or cloud infrastructure might be much less hectic than working on quant or data science projects.
With employment numbers so high here in the UK and in the US people need to remember that there are massive amounts of "tech" jobs in non-tech companies and they generally haven't been doing massive layoffs. The demand is still there if you don't mind doing the same job in a less sexy company.
Hopefully their skills get redistributed to the wider market so more companies can ship decent products and innovate instead of only a few ones holding the brainpower hostage
> ...their skills get redistributed to the wider market so more companies can ship decent products and innovate...
There is a larger technical culture and corporate political element with a strong undercurrent of budgets that has more to do with "products and innovate" at these non-BigTech companies, than someone from leading edge BigTech might be used to. BigTech companies also have such characteristics in most teams, but those leading edge teams due to incentives get all the public relations press internally and even externally.
Many of my non-BigTech clients have some full time staff who are plenty proficient in technical matters to seek BigTech employment. However, the rank and file staff of developers are almost invariably majority outsourced H1B's for budgetary reasons. This sets up a perverse incentive.
No matter how much the developers might agree with the advanced concepts promulgated by the full time staff developers, at the end of the day their outsourcing companies' contract renewals rely upon how many tasks assigned to them get "done" on time. And the project managers / scrum masters / etc. all the way up to and including middle management do not act upon the full-timers' advice (pretty basic, like build security and SRE in from the beginning) and encode it into the definition of "done" because they don't directly benefit from doing so.
There are ways to fix this situation, but they don't directly involve fancy tech or tech stacks.
I think there is a bit of a contradiction in this logic. Why would redistributing 'skills' that lead other companies to lose cash at an astronomical scale help other companies improve? If their product and innovation was truly transformative perhaps the tech industry wouldn't be in the state it is in as sustainable business.
If someone is fired from a start-up that just has some kind of nebulous speculated future value, it doesn’t mean they lacked skills — they might have been successfully creating some part of it. The market just has decided that what they were working on might not actually have that nebulous future value.
They might be able to for example go work for a company that produces objects, and then sells them to consumers in exchange for money. Then the value of their skills will be a little more obvious I guess.
How many engineers feel restricted by management? Putting them in smaller and more flexible companies can help them shine and finally put their experience to full use
You are assuming that in these companies the managers are a completely separate class, but the truth is in most of big tech most senior developers / architects feed directly into product roadmap and management. In fact most of big tech make a point of trying not to hire pure managerial folks.
In other words it is not purely management who are responsible for most user-hostile interfaces, ethically dubious business models (how to optimise gaming addiction) or bloated infrastructure (kubernetes when it is not needed,...), highly-skilled tech folks need to own up for these low-interest rate phenomena as well.
> Why would redistributing 'skills' that lead other companies to lose cash [...] help [...]?
My guess at the parent commenter's presupposition would be that they had been overpaid and will now be forced to work for normal wages. At those lower wages, it might become economical to employ them, while those same people weren't economical at silicon-valley-scale wages.
That seems plausible to me, at least in some cases. I don't know the full picture in other companies, but in the case of Meta/Facebook, the company actually asked managers to transition to individual contributor jobs.
TL;DR Sorry for the long comment. This should have been a blog post somewhere (but I don’t have a blog). Companies and people have a mutual agreement that either can walk away from. There may be a slight power disbalance in the company’s favour. How individuals are fired and laid off should be regulated to provide basic decency/courtesy (give them basic rights such as being informed by/having the chance to talk to their manager 1:1). I don’t know the labor laws, this may already be the case. But not knowing my/our rights is also a failing of the system.
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Why do companies exist? What should be the role of a good corporate citizen? These are questions that have puzzled me for the last decade or so.
I think, depending on the context - the answer can change. Depending on role of the individual at the company, the answer can change too.
From an entrepreneur’s perspective, a company limits their (otherwise unlimited) liability. That’s another way of saying, a company limits the personal liability of its leadership in all matters concerning the company (eg. so they don’t end up losing their homes and bank accounts in the case of a bankruptcy).
For those of you well versed in this topic, I am referring to a company being an incorporated entity (an S corporation in the US, or a federal/provincial corporation in Canada).
From an investors perspective, it’s a way to multiply their large investment while having some say in the company’s running.
From a board of directors perspective, it’s a way to share your learned experience of running a company with other executives without being directly involved in operations. And acting as the first line of representatives (of the shareholders) to hold the company leadership accountable. They get modestly compensated for their troubles (compared to executives).
Now the best part - from an employees’ perspective, a company is provides them/their family security and shelter (Maslov’s bottom hierarchy). Some of us luck out and work at companies where we believe in their mission (upper half of the hierarchy of needs).
I’ve always known the above, but writing it down at once gave me a profound realization - a company is a mutual agreement. Doing work that is valued by the company in exchange for personal security (money, benefits, perks, etc). Either side can choose to walk away any time and they have control over how they do it. This is the part that sucks the most and is least consistent. Like getting laid off over zoom, all access being immediately revoked, etc vs more humane layoffs such as Gitlabs - where each affected individuals manager reached out to them. This should be non-negotiable in my opinion.
Dehumanizing the act of laying off someone is the most selfish and disrespectful thing an organization can ever do.
To think about it - this isn’t all that different from a breakup.
In any case, I think the law can work on the last thing above and maybe - just maybe - there is also an opportunity to revisit the notice period (esp. in the case of a layoff/firing an employee). Mandatory 2 weeks or pay in lieu seems little/too short, especially for an employee who may have worked somewhere for years. I don’t know if there are labor laws surrounding severance, but I am clear now that we need them to fix the disbalance of power between a company (say 100 people or more) and an employee.
Is it backend engineers, operations, UI designers, marketing/HR/management working in tech? Is an accountant a tech worker if they use slick, modern software? Does it matter where they work or who they're working with? What is a "tech company"?