Where did the laid-off tech workers go?
T.To understand the change in tone that occurred in silicon valley In the last few months, look no further Mark Zuckerberg’s February’s declaration that 2023 will be the Year of Efficiency. That’s hardly a heartbeat-setting word unless you’re the employee on the receiving end. announced that it would lay off 10,000 staff.
Not just meta. March 20th AmazonAnother tech giant has already laid off 18,000 white-collar workers and said it would cut another 9,000 corporate jobs. American tech companies have announced 118,000 layoffs so far this year, according to data provider Crunchbase, on top of 140,000 cuts last year. On March 24, the chief operating officer (COO) of business software company Salesforce hinted that the company will soon add to his 8,000 layoffs it announced in January.
Investors are cheering for the tech industry’s new cost consciousness.tech heavy Nasdaq The index is up 16% from its recent low in late December. And there is more to come. Only 6% of the US tech workforce will be laid off after early 2022. The layoffs are only beginning to reduce industry-wide employment as tech companies continued to hire him through 2022 (see Figure 1). By comparison, between the dot-com boom’s peak in the early 2000s and its low point at the end of 2003, America’s overall tech workforce fell by 23%, or 685,000 jobs.
Yet the recent layoffs have been far-reaching and deep enough to raise two questions. First, who’s getting the chops? Second, where do fired workers go?
Tim Herbert of the Computing Technology Industry Association says so far the engineers themselves have largely escaped.Tier), trade associations. Instead, the ax mostly fell on business functions like sales and hiring. These have been steadily increasing as a share of technology industry employment in recent years, a clear sign of expansion (see Figure 2). Between the pandemic’s nadir in spring 2020 and his employment peak in early 2023, the tech sector added about 1 million workers. We needed to hire a lot of recruiters just to hire such numbers. As a rule of thumb for headhunting, one recruiter can hire 25 new employees per year. Many of those recruiters may currently meet your requirements.
But experts are not immune. As part of the layoffs, Meta will reorganize its tech department in his April. Freeing up talented tech workers could benefit other sectors engaged in digital reinvention. For years, unattractive industries like industrial products have struggled to compete with the tech industry for talent. Now they are on the raid. American tractor maker John Deere is recruiting laid-off tech workers to help develop smarter farm machinery. Last year, the company opened an office in Austin, Texas’s thriving tech hub. Automakers are increasingly focused on software, but they are also starving for technical talent. So do banks, health insurance companies and retailers.
Some of the laid-off techs are backing a new generation of startups. From January world Combinator, a Silicon Valley startup school, grew fivefold over the previous year.Excitement is particularly strong in the bustling areas of chatGPT– like “generative” artificial intelligence (AI), using complex algorithms and large amounts of data to create everything from essays to artwork (in fact, this is one area that big tech companies continue to embrace enthusiastically).
Optimists hope that entrepreneurs will come up with a variety of clever applications and that this technology will unleash a new wave of creative disruption, much like smartphones before it.new AIOver time, there may be even less need for human marketers, for example. But they, like other breakthroughs before them, have the potential to create entirely new professions. Especially in the technology industry itself. ■
https://www.economist.com/business/2023/03/27/where-have-all-the-sacked-tech-workers-gone Where did the laid-off tech workers go?
