Super interesting seeing companies grow like wildfire and overspend as returns for investors skyrocket, and then as the market swings downward, they buoy their stock prices a bit by just as quickly cutting heads.<p>The inverted accountability scheme for leaders doing this is another perverse enabling factor; I've complained about this before, but that tends to lead to flames about why founders etc. can't have ownership of headcount and the fate of their companies etc.<p>I'm not seeing a clear solution for this culture of toying with thousands of peoples' lives for a quick buck... well, aside from the (sadly) politically loaded move to unionize more white collar work and thus provide actual accountability. Why unions are a political matter is beyond me; IATSE uses their strength to ensure excellent benefits for their members in media/entertainment.
Nobody can convince me that big corps are not taking part this "trend" of firing people with the purpose of rehiring them later and keep the compensation of the workforce in check.<p>As many comments have already pointed out, all these companies are sitting on a huge cushion of money, and if you have money the best moment to invest is during a crisis. Companies realized a long time ago that they should find ways of lowering salaries, now the big moment finally came it seems.
Headline is confusing. It makes it sound like there will be 18k new layoffs, but this is information that has been public since November and the cuts happened two days ago. (Or at least the bulk of them did)
Interesting. I cannot separate what the Feds said regarding inflation tbh. On one side, the government was gloating over the fact of low unemployment numbers, on the other side, you have the Feds saying with no shame whatsoever they need to low inflation numbers by raising interest rates and orquestrate moves to layoff people with the objective to lower the demand for goods and services.<p>This looks like a coordinated "attack" where companies and government colluded against the common folk. There's a win-win for them. Companies will start reducing salaries since there'll be more supply of workers, and the government will say "we promise to lower inflation" as campaign slogan.
There's rarely any talk about how many of these (if any!) are actually contractors / vendors. All the big companies have outsourced a huge number of staff to agencies (presumably to be more flexible in short-term budgeting and "turning the resource off", when needed, so they don't have to worry about the legal intricacies, as that is by-design conveniently also outsourced to the vendor in most cases). Curious if the 18k here is on top of shutting down external contracts.
For the company that spent decades putting mom and pop shops out of business it is very hard to feel sad for layoffs. It's just their own bed these folks now have to sleep in. As an investor I am also happy. For the workers, it's sad maybe unfair but such is life.
Is there a good tracker of layoffs in tech with a breakdown of how many were software vs marketing vs service/warehouse/ancillary workers? I'm curious what the software engineer availability glut scale might be at the moment...