So. Many. Layoffs.

I’ve been looking at getting back into the ring of software engineering, but it doesn’t seem like a great time to do it.

When Google was laying off workers, I shook my head a bit. It ends up that Google spent 800 million dollars in layoffs just this month. Just this month!

By comparison, Google spent $2.1 billion dollars on layoff expenses for more than 12,000 employees over the course of 2023. Other Google employees only knew about people being dismissed when people’s emails got bounced back last year in February.

With so many layoffs, hopefully they’re getting better at it. Well, maybe not. Google employees have been told more layoffs are coming this year.

I imagine that there are some pretty high quality resumes floating around. As far as the tech field goes, Google is probably considered top tier, and landing a position against someone with Google on their resume is going to be tough.

There’s a problem with that, though. More than 25,000 tech workers from 100 companies got the axe in first few weeks of 2024. Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, TikTok and Salesforce are included in that… and Microsoft numbers may account for the Blizzard/Activision layoffs that happened this past week, sadly.

Blizzard was one of those dream jobs I had as a significantly younger developer way back when. They were often late on delivery for a new game, but it was pretty much worth it. I still play Starcraft II.

It’s become an employer’s job market – maybe it was before, but definitely more so now, and in an era when artificial intelligence may be becoming more attractive for companies and software development, as well as other things. For all we know, they may have consulted artificial intelligence for some of the layoffs, though. It wouldn’t be the first time that happened, though that was in Russia.

I can’t imagine that Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon aren’t using big data and AI for this, at least behind the scenes, but it’s probably not being explained because of the blowback that might cause. ‘Fired by AI’ is not something that people would like to see.

When tech companies axe companies, Wall Street rewards them, so stock prices go up – and there are more unemployed technology folk in a period when AI tools are making so many types of productivity easier. Maybe too much easier.

This reminds me so much of the 1990s. The good news is that tech survived the 1990s despite the post-merger layoffs.

Of course, the correction on the NPR article(at the bottom) is something I wish I had caught earlier. “Nearly 25,000 tech workers were laid in the first weeks of 2024. Why is that?would definitely be an article worth reading.

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