I’ve been heavily considering a career change. I’m in government, so on top of the DOGE bullshit, I can’t even look to the private sector for reprieve because tech layoffs have been insane for over 3 years.
Comment on Microsoft laying off about 6,000 people, or 3% of its workforce
AmbiguousProps@lemmy.today 22 hours agoThere will definitely be more, especially as the economic situation in the US continues to worsen. Big tech works under the unsustainable model of unlimited growth, and even if profits increase, if they don’t increase “enough” they lay off workers. They could save a ton of money by laying off execs, but they’ll never do that.
I’ve found layoffs.fyi to be pretty up to date with tracking how many people are laid off in the tech sector. It’s no wonder that it’s nearly impossible to find a job in tech, and these execs and boards are to blame.
bassomitron@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Ledericas@lemm.ee 14 hours ago
is it still hard? even with layoffs, people can get some jobs, eventhough not as high as income as before.
cant say the same for other stem industries, where its already very difficult to get a job in the field prior to even the pandemic. im guessing with all the funding being cut from the sciences , universities might be suffering as are biotech jobs(which are limited and gatekeeped on purpose)
AmbiguousProps@lemmy.today 13 hours ago
It is, at least in my experience. My recently laid off colleagues have been trying to find work for months, some of whom have been applying for jobs that would require pay cuts. Pretty much every job listing in the tech space gets hundreds if not thousands of applicants because the layoffs have not stopped for three years. You can see what I mean at layoffs.fyi. In tech, 60,000 so far this year, 153,000 in 2024, 264,000 in 2023, and 165,000 in 2022.
That’s not even counting those that graduated in the last couple of years. Those people are in an extra bad spot because they have a large amount of college debt with no way to make their payments.
All of STEM is suffering because of corporate greed and rising anti-intellectualism.
Ledericas@lemm.ee 13 hours ago
oh yea, i feel sorry for HS and recent grads, especially people in CS, i known about cs problems for a decade. most graduates from my non-prestigious state school are mostly CS majors, and they all complained about the lack of jobs. Biotech is just wierd in general , must have wet lab work prior to graduation, and then all the bs with applying.
My bro was laid off in 23, his degree was a wierd hybrid of some programming and tech related, so he dint find a job for a whole year, then landed a very high income job early last decade, until '23, and he hasnt found a job since after the layoff, and is living off of the severance, he hasnt shown interest in finding another job though. my other bro is still in his tech job luckily, they hadnt done massive layoffs yet.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
All of STEM is suffering because of corporate greed and rising anti-intellectualism.
How do I say that even … it’s normal. When you are talking about infinite growth being unsustainable, that means that at some point the industry should implode.
They have sort of an oligopoly and stagnation now, which is why all these layoffs happen - the “AI” solves some problems cheaper than people, even accounting for the worse results.
But if we imagine the industry suddenly destroying that oligopoly and becoming interesting again, it still would require less people.
AmbiguousProps@lemmy.today 5 hours ago
I’m not saying there wouldn’t be layoffs without it, but it certainly would be better. I know from experience that a lot of the people that were laid off were a critical part of the team, and those that remained had to bare that load. It has burned me out several times, because I’m doing work that should be done by two or three people.
Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 18 hours ago
By “Big tech” I think you meant “capitalism”
AmbiguousProps@lemmy.today 18 hours ago
Sure, it’s just even worse with big tech.
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Not every company under capitalism is publicly traded with shareholders to answer to.
Saleh@feddit.org 9 hours ago
I have a question. Everyone keeps speaking of the “tech” sector. Does that only refer to IT or does it cover engineers as well? Because in Europe it seems they keep struggling to get enough people with IT knowledge into engineering projects.
azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
It’s because the ~*~tech~*~ sector fundamentally relies on different economics than most engineering companies, and that has investors absolutely bricked up.
What investors being sold by “tech” companies is infinite ROI. Sure, [YouTube/Twitter/Uber/whoever] has never been profitable more than a few quarters in a row (if that), but think! They have virtually no fixed costs! That means if we just inject a few more millions in R&D we will finally reach the threshold where we can scale deployments to hundreds of millions of users who will be paying us MRR! Hosting costs are virtually nothing and at that scale R&D is basically free as well! And if push comes to shove, we can reduce costs to nearly zero by firing all the engineers! The economies of scale are practically infinite, they say.
It’s the rare instance where capitalists actually care about long-terms gain a bit too much. The tech industry tends to be single-mindedly chasing monthly user counts first and revenue second or third. Then at some point reality catches up, the accountants start getting their way, the product starts getting enshittified, and the users leave for something else. Did the product actually turn a net profit over its lifetime? Who knows, who cares. Everyone who made those early business decisions has long since cashed out.
Where the markets are unbelievably irrational is that this frenzy has spilled over into industries where the the sales pitch for infinite economies of scale doesn’t even make theoretical sense. Tesla sells physical products, so why are they worth more than every other automotive company combined? OpenAI operates at an enormous loss because LLMs are just expensive to train and run by nature, so they cannot be profitable under the current business model at any scale. Yet here we are. Just because it’s labeled as “tech”, investors are throwing our retirement funds into it. And any time the markets are being irrational, there’s a risk that investors wise up to the bad fundamentals and the whole thing comes crashing down.
In Europe we’ve been spared some of the worst of the craziness. Although venture capitalism is alive and well in the software sector, I would wager that European companies tend to have stronger fundamentals on average (but that’s just a gut feeling, I’m not an economist).
AmbiguousProps@lemmy.today 5 hours ago
I’m a DevOps engineer, if that counts.
jenesaisquoi@feddit.org 8 hours ago
It’s mostly software, but somehow no one calls it that. It’s weird.