Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

TylerJWhit t1_j8thak7 wrote

I saw this article by Insider the other day, I am curious if you would concur with what Recruiters are saying: https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-company-layoffs-pay-salary-cuts-remote-work-recruiter-power-2023-2

Are you seeing the negative effects of these layoffs as outlined by the Harvard Business Review? https://hbr.org/podcast/2023/02/why-many-companies-get-layoffs-wrong

How are businesses shifting their tech strategies long term? I see a lot of discussion about pulling back on their migrations to the cloud. I am concerned that this will result in increasingly aged hardware and software and a lack of High Availability in major critical infrastructure. Would you agree with those concerns, or are there other aspects along these veins that you think would be good to know?

2

BusinessInsider OP t1_j8tmwdl wrote

Hey there! This is a bunch of questions haha, so I’m going to break it down with a bullet or so for each q

- I saw that article too. And it definitely matches up with what I’ve heard from my recent chats with recruiters.

- There are definitely negative impacts of these layoffs. And we’ve already started seeing that across companies. I think Twitter is an extreme but perfect example of this: things are breaking on the front-end, employee morale is pretty low, and entire (vital) teams are missing.

- The experts and tech industry people who I’ve chatted with have pointed a few major long-term shifts. Most notably, there’s a focus on efficiency over innovation (like how multiple Big Tech companies have shuttered their moonshot branches). But at the same time, they can’t ignore how the tech industry keeps innovating. Generative AI (thanks to ChatGPT) for example is a curveball that they definitely weren’t prepping for a few months ago. Yet a lot of these companies are now scrambling to react to it.

- I totally agree with your concerns. Cloud is getting hit pretty hard right now, and it ties back into your question about the negative effects of layoffs — this is definitely one of them. Within Big Tech alone, cloud spending has decreased a bunch (my teammate Paayal Zaveri wrote about it here: https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-amazon-google-cloud-business-lower-spending-growth-slowed-charts-2023-2?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=IAmA-comment) And it’s especially pronounced since digital transformation was such a buzzword during the pandemic tech boom. But optimistically, this cool-off likely won’t last forever. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella even predicted that the sector could rebound as soon as this year: https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-ceo-earnings-azure-slowdown-cloud-bounce-back-2023-1?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=IAmA-comment1

-DNS

5

TylerJWhit t1_j8tsmzo wrote

That's one aspect that seems striking that you touched on. The market is definitely hot with inflation, causing a lot of uncertainty, but the layoffs just do not make sense and appear to be a large overreaction that doesn't match the market.

1