I think 5 is pretty spurious at this point. I don't think any serious businesses are trying to replace most of their devs with ai yet. Otherwise you got a lot of the reasons. I think there's a few more. There's probably pressure being placed on leadership at a lot of companies by VCs, investors, and shareholders to trim the fat. That's why I think a lot of these layoffs seem pretty random, with situations like people's manager having no idea their direct reports were getting let go. The layoffs are coming from a fairly high level in these organizations. You mentioned this but this has a lot to do with the perception of the money people more than it has to do with reality, imo. That's why you can have extremely profitable companies like Google firing 10% of their workforce. Hugely destructive imo.
Additionally, January is the end of the fiscal year. Companies want to make cuts to their budget before February.
I've been seeing a lot of action in terms of recruiting outreach however. There seem to be a lot of very small startups getting created with a different financial attitude, eg trying to focus more on balancing profitability with growth. Rough time to be a late stage start up that just spent the last 8-10 years collecting debt and losing money on every new user. Supposedly the fed is going to cut rates at some point this year, so maybe that changes the calculus here eventually.
When my company did layoffs last year, neither my manager, or my manager's manager, or my manager's manager's manager knew before the moment we all knew if we were staying or not. You had to go up to the VP level to find anyone who was involved in planning the layoffs.
When the VP has about a thousand engineers recursively reporting up to them, how are they supposed to be able to decide who stays and who goes. We were told that the layoffs weren't performance related, but at that level of distance what useful signals are there outside of the performance rating?
Additionally, January is the end of the fiscal year. Companies want to make cuts to their budget before February.
I've been seeing a lot of action in terms of recruiting outreach however. There seem to be a lot of very small startups getting created with a different financial attitude, eg trying to focus more on balancing profitability with growth. Rough time to be a late stage start up that just spent the last 8-10 years collecting debt and losing money on every new user. Supposedly the fed is going to cut rates at some point this year, so maybe that changes the calculus here eventually.