It’s a dark time to be a tech worker right now::Nearly 300,000 tech employees have been laid off since last year, data shows.
Executives: We’re doing more with less!
grinding, screeching noises coming from the engine room
Executives: Better profits! Lower costs!
grinding, screeching noises coming from the engine room
To be fair, those are the normal TARDIS sounds.
On the other hand, Dr Who doesn’t have an engineering or SRE staff.
“It’s a good time to unionize tech workers right now…”
Best time to form a union was yesterday. Next best is today.
Dotcom bubble. 2008 crash. Covid. Now this.
We’ve all been through these. Buckle down. Ignore the outliers. It’s a chance to rethink and do what matters to you.
Also, ALWAYS have a Plan B, C, and D.
When it was a dark time for the empire the shogun cut off the heads of 141 lords… Maybe we should start there.
Land lords
Interesting trend in the comments - technology veterans who went through the dotCom crash have quietly moved to union jobs, and aren’t sweating this iteration.
Worth keeping in mind.
I’ve never met a dev in a union. What companies have a union?
Google has one, but it’s still very small at the moment.
Technology unions are common in public sector roles.
Probably because the culture is different in a few key ways:
- Government workers rarely even get a cost of living adjustment, without a union, even when they’re critical. Politicians often have the final say, and often don’t care about retaining key staff. (Or actively try to lose key staff…) This leads to a situation where the Union has strong public support, because the Union’s motives are aligned with allowing basic government services to continue during political wind changes.
- A government doing Union busting gets immediately called out as Fascism. The government telling you you can’t get together to talk about how the government should change - is not a good look.
Unions aren’t exactly a saving grace
I would argue they are. My reasoning for this argument would be pointing at the history of the working class.
What is your reasoning for saying they are not?
Corporations wouldn’t fight unions so hard (historically trying to kill their members) if unions weren’t both effective and a threat to their power and wealth. They really, REALLY do not want us to unionize.
I read an article this week about how the Kinks were black listed from playing in the US in the mid to late 1960s because they pissed off someone involved with the stage/theater workers union. It was wild to me that a union could hold so much sway over commercial operations in the US.
Low pay for one. They start you low even if you have experience. You lose the ability to negotiate your pay or promotions.
This kind of bullshit generalization leads me to believe this conversation wouldn’t go very far. I’ll stop here. Cheers.
lol. Sounds like a cop out because you have no counter argument. Not a surprise
I work at a large tech company, and the feeling here is unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. There are a few camps:
- Workers on visas that are utterly petrified of losing their jobs, and are struggling to plan for anything long-term, since companies that lay people off can’t file green cards for employees.
- Workers that are just numb to everything. They don’t give a fuck, they are jaded with the bullshit their employer pulls, and work is just work.
- People that would happily take a voluntary layoff to GTFO, spend some time with family, and potentially move to something better.
What seems to be the dominating feeling that everyone has, is that they no longer support their leaders. They feel there are too many middle-managers, they realise that their C-Suite staff are fucking useless, and the CEO’s are almost universally awful as leaders. Sundar has caused Google to nose-dive in popularity, Jassy is so ineffective that no one even knows he is CEO, Musk is a known sociopath going through a mental breakdown, Zuck bet everything on VR to mask huge privacy/product failings, and alongside all of this are dozens of CEO’s that forced employees back to the office or laid people off for bullshit reasons.
My hope from this dark time is that companies arise that focus on the employee first, learn from the mistakes made by big tech, and purposefully manoeuvre around FAANG until they are relegated to boomer tech. Until then, like most SWE’s, I’m just hoping things get better soon…
Are you referring specifically to the big, popular tech companies everyone knows about or to the whole industry? Because there are a lot of smaller companies who aren’t yet run by psychopaths, at least not any more than usual.
I trust my boss but his boss is the CEO and I think the CEO is a piece of garbage.
an overpaid piece of garbage
Given that no one noticed he went on vacation for three weeks I agree.
To be honest that sounds like a CEO that trusts the workers, if he’s letting you guys do the f you want. Unless i misunderstood and somehow he still manages to f stuff up for you.
Maybe I just don’t really like being told what to do so I am being unfair to the guy. You do have a point.
But i agree that it’s basically a useless role anyway, and it’s paid 10-50x the average salary
Keep in mind the core value of most of these companies is “we have a web page”. If only all these unhappy developers could somehow create their own webpage and we could all switch to using the web page of a better company…
(Preaching to the choir here, since we’re on Lemmy. I guess nobody is making money or employing people because of Lemmy though.)
1k job applications since June I’m ready for the inevitable end
700+ applications and multiple recruiting companies later and still only 3 interviews since May. With almost a decade of software development experience. It’s actually a little reassuring that I’m not alone here and it’s not just a problem with me. Best of luck in your search friend!
Ok whew I thought I was just doing something wrong. Glad to hear but also not glad to hear figuring what we’re having to go through
Just wanted to drop this update in here for anybody going through this now: I finally got a job offer, but it took over 1700 total applications, and 11 months! I hope you have had some luck in finding something since your original comment!
All the best to you, my dude.
If people randomly drew your name out of a hat, on average you would have to apply to “the average number of applicants for positions you are applying for” number of jobs to get hired. Keep at it, some jobs see thousands of applicants.
So they’re juicing their profit margins for a couple years. Let’s see what happens in another couple years when they failed to invest in the next things because they laid everyone off.
And seeing what mass copyright infringement corporation OpenAI just dropped we can expect it to be a million more by the end of the year.
Explain me like I’m five - why?
Because the big tech companies are laying off, all the tech companies have decided they too need to layoff people to lower costs, improve profits, report better earnings, etc.
Fast forward to next year when they’re up shit creek because their skeleton crews can’t possibly do All The Things. Executives retire, take huge bonuses; repeat.
There’s no evidence that the layoffs at these firms are actually tech workers. Tons of other positions exist at these companies, like managers, sales, marketing, support staff.
My money is on administrative/clerical. This is the easiest to automate.
What on earth do you mean no evidence? I mean just check layoffs.fyi which specifically tracks this.
I’m trying to find where on the site where it tracks the type of employees laid off but it doesn’t seem to track that at all?
For companies/employees that choose to share (eg in hopes of getting recruited to a new job) you can even get individuals information from that site. That includes actual job titles.
These companies tend to be very light on administrative roles anyway. So the ratios make sense even if they just laid off 5% of staff in total.
I’m not seeing that at all. Only total employees laid off and the industry the company is in.
You don’t know what you’re talking about. I personally know multiple devs who were laid off from my company. These companies don’t give a shit about your skills anymore, they’re purely looking at how much money you cost them.
Devs are getting laid off, but he actually does have a point that in the case of several of the biggest companies, the hardest hit were middle management, not devs.
The industry is experiencing historic shrinkage post COVID due to unsustainable growth during COVID.
Any evidence to back up using the word “historic”, here? The dotCom burst was historic, but by the numbers I’ve seen, this doesn’t come close.
I would argue “interesting footnote in the boom/bust cycle”.
I know that’s not how it feels to the folks going through job searches right now, though.
It’s the worst market since 2008. I don’t know why people feel the need to minimize it. It’s certainly more than a footnote.
And 2008 was the worst since the the great depression. In between we saw the dotCom bust, which was itself the worst since the slump in the 80s.
But the boom and bust cycle is well established.
We don’t do eachother any favors by talking like it’s the end of the world this time.
I suspect the sensational headlines are meant to distract from systemic issues that feed the cycle.
As long as the narrative is “this time is unique”, it distracts from discussing improving the situation.
I don’t mean to minimize it, though. It sucks!
I wouldn’t be too concerned. 300k is not really that many compared to the size of the industry. And there is a ton of aging software that is falling apart due to a lack of investment. Like the airlines. And all the utilities that keep getting hacked. And hospitals. With governments starting to hold companies responsible for getting hacked, there will be jobs to rebuild hold software a plenty.
Most work environments I’ve been in enable 1 developer to do work that requires 2 developers to maintain.
Yeah, or 3. Lol.
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Unemployment is at record lows. Some sectors are hiring a lot more people than the tech sector is shedding. It’s not really complicated.
Job sectors come and go, grow and shrink. Imagine how silly I would sound if I said: “there is almost no work for horse cart builders but the gov says that unemployment is at record lows, how can this be?”
Edit: Gonna try being less upset about some things.
So you are telling me that there is now 300,000 tech workers now able to focus on open source projects to keep their foot in the coding door while they drive forklifts or serve McDonald while waiting on the AI hiring bots to read their resumes?
Problem being, because big tech money has so distorted the economies of the cities it’s clustered in, many of these people can only choose between finding another tech job ASAP, moving away from their industry to a lower cost metro with limited job opportunities, or imminent homelessness. Driving a forklift won’t pay the rent, and commercial real estate is so absurdly priced that there may not even be a restaurant to wait tables at.
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Speaking of copycats, I have a feeling this all might have started with Elon showing Twitter “can do the same with less.”
