It may feel like the current rash of tech layoffs started with Twitter, but they did not. Twitter was just loud about it.
Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement firm, track terminations, and in 2022 tech led the way, with 97,171 job cuts, up 649% from 2021. So Twitter’s 3,000 to 4,000 employees and 4,000 to 5,000 contractors who were laid off are significant, but certainly not the biggest group of layoffs.
TechCrunch has a searchable database of layoffs in tech companies, and although many organizations’ totals are listed as “unclear,” it shows how many tech companies have laid off people in 2022. (For inexplicable reasons, if you sort by number of terminations, it sorts numbers as if they were letters. So 1, 100, and 10,000 all come before 2.)
In other words, many people who used to work in tech are now (presumably) on the job market. How does that affect recruiting? Is there a smorgasbord of new talent that employers can snap up quickly, or is finding the right candidates still as hard as ever?
To keep reading, click here: Tech Layoffs Should Make Tech Recruiting Easier. So Why Isn’t It?
This article brought up the key point of why finding these “supposedly highly skilled ” employees are going to be harder than the employers figure. Remember despite all the demands made by employees for job satisfaction in order to actually show up for work, employers still have the ingrained notion that they can get the maximum output for the least amount of cost effect on their profit line. So why hire full-time positions when they can achieve the same with fewer payroll dollars?
On the employee side, most of these tech workers had side gigs that give them income, so unless they had no other income flow, they going to wait to return to work under company requirements, especially since they have the quiet quitting attitude of doing the less amount of effort needed to keep earning money.
With both sides refusing to compromise, these types of jobs will be replaced with AI technology soon.
I recruit devs for big companies. Quiet quitting is an invented phrase. Absolutely no one uses it outside a couple of crusty old business magazines and senior tech company managers laying the groundwork to divert attention from who is ultimately responsible for the need for mass layoffs.
Tech is a huge umbrella for different sets of skills. A cloud architect has only a little overlap with say an encryption expert. So the actual pool for a set of skills in much smaller and difficult to recruit
Most devs don’t have side jobs. That is just plain stupid. The job at hand of writing complex production software under time pressure requires far more time effort and brain cycles than 9 to 5 will allow.
They do have savings from the high salaries to ride it out which seems to infuriate some people.
The boy geniuses killed fantasy projects that were using these devs. They were operating billion dollar companies with a VC bro mindset.
We don’t really have a plan in the US to teach tech to children in the less than privileged classes so we import them from India.
The bottom line is that it is a redistribution of talent rather than a purge.
Pffft, I had to laugh at the un-fixed alphabetical number sort when looking at numbers of tech people let go – evidently they should hire one to fix that. XD Not to be flippant, I get that it can be tricky with some framework constraints… But still… Teehee.
If the totals listed as “unclear” are the same column as the actual numbers, the field in the database is configured as text, not a number. And the numbers are sorting as text. There are ways around that, but they require more skill than, apparently, whosever build that web site has.
Many of these tech companies ruined themselves by going woke, and will not recover. Hiring their woke staff (which includes most, but not all of their staff) is a great way for their new employers to suffer the same fate. It makes sense to me that well-run companies are starting to pay attention to this danger and shy away from it.