The first time Julian Chavez got laid off from his job as a digital ad sales rep at web.com didn’t turn him off from the tech industry. Neither did the second time when he was laid off from ZipRecruiter. By the third time, though, Chavez had had enough.
“I really loved what I did,” said Phoenix-based Chavez in a text message. “But the layoffs got me jaded.” Now he’s pursuing a graduate degree in psychology.
Chavez is one of hundreds of thousands of tech workers who’ve been laid off in the past two years in what now seems like a never-ending wave of cuts that has upended the culture of Silicon Valley and the expectations of those who work at some of America’s richest and most powerful companies.
Last year, tech companies laid off more than 260,000 workers according to layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi, cuts that executives mostly blamed on “over-hiring” during the pandemic and high interest rates making it harder to invest in new business ventures. But as those layoffs have dragged into 2024 despite stabilizing interest rates and a booming job market in other industries, the tech workforce is feeling despondent and confused.
The U.S. economy added 353,000 jobs in January, a huge boost that was around twice what economists had expected. And yet, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Discord, Salesforce and eBay all made significant cuts in January, and the layoffs don’t seem to be abating. On Tuesday, PayPal said in a letter to workers it would cut another 2,500 employees or about 9 percent of its workforce.
The continued cuts come as companies are under pressure from investors to improve their bottom lines. Wall Street’s sell-off of tech stocks in 2022 pushed companies to win back investors by focusing on increasing profits, and firing some of the tens of thousands of workers hired to meet the pandemic boom in consumer tech spending. With many tech companies laying off workers, cutting employees no longer signaled weakness. Now, executives are looking for more places where they can squeeze more work out of fewer people.
I wonder if any of this is punitive for push-back on RTO or union efforts.
It’s almost just a function of business at this point. Since engineers aren’t unionized, companies have become lazily complacent to use layoffs and rehires as a mechanism to manage each quarter’s budget. It needs to stop.
That’s part of it, plus salary rebalancing of junior roles. These roles aren’t being eliminated. Engineers should unionize.