Nearly 25,000 tech workers were laid off in the first weeks of 2024. Why is that?::undefined

  • nihilvain@lemmy.mlEnglish
    212·
    10 months ago

    As others stated a small portion of that was due to over-hiring, some to follow the layoff trend and some to make the earnings call look good.

    But from what some experts are saying; there’s also another factor, which is even worse.

    There’s a looming threat of a recession hitting in a few months (which is said to be a much bigger recession than the post-Covid one). And this recession will be tied to the Commercial Real-Estate Bubble.

    They are saying that it will be like the 2009 Mortgage Crisis and will be very disruptive.

    There’s this theory that companies are reducing their headcount to prepare for this recession by reducing their expenses to the minimum. Which makes sense.

    For the companies without savings that is a must but the ugly part is that you see big names with huge amounts of money in the bank laying off people as well.

    Well, because they don’t want to invest that money on the people, they will use all that money to buy smaller companies when the recession hits. All big tech with enough money in the bank is rooting for the recession to happen so they can buy everything for very cheap and grow even more.

    • AA5B@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      10 months ago

      I don’t get how there’s any connection. Sure, it sucks to own commercial real estate, or be one of the service companies that grew up to support office work, but isn’t the whole problem being that tech and other large companies no longer want to pay for that? This should be a bonanza for tech companies, saving billions of dollars that formerly went toward renting office space. Why aren’t we expecting a tech company boom?

  • Evotech@lemmy.worldEnglish
    142·
    10 months ago

    There was massive over hiring near the end of covid. So now they are shedding again.

    Everyone is cutting headcount, so everyone else is following along. Thinking this must be good we stay competitive.

    It’s a pretty US focused issue though, as in European countries you can’t just fire someone like that. There’s definitely more cautious hiring though.

  • linearchaos@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    10 months ago

    WFH made some cool opportunity hires. You could access people in remote areas and pay less.

    Market rev is uncertain at the moment. They all want their numbers to come in hot. When everyone else is laying off, so they get less scrutiny.

  • SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    10 months ago

    How much of those were in office jobs versus work from home? I mean, with the whole back to office push, is your job safe in the office or more likely it’s all been just more “cat playing with a mouse”?

  • Skyrmir@lemmy.worldEnglish
    610·
    10 months ago

    Because they all hired way too many people right after the pandemic and are just realizing they fucked up.

    • Copernican@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15·
      10 months ago

      That’s not what the article says. The article is saying that was true last year that the hiring spree was over optimistic and needed correction. Now that is not the case, but there’s a weird knock on effect where the market has rewarded this behavior companies keep tightening to continue being rewarded. And there’s a heard mentality where if company A gets rewarded by the market for layoffs, company B faces scrutiny from major shareholders not to do the same.

      I think the initial correction of layoffs kind of made sense a year ago, but this article makes me think there is something not cool happening as it keeps continuing.