It’s newsworthy! The current story being told in tech is that we can lay off significant parts of the workforce with no impact. Following this, the resulting failures are generally hidden or otherwise non-obvious.
Because a Fortune Global 500 high-tech company doesn't lay-off 10% of it's workforce very often. When they do it signals an underlying weakness in either the company, sector or economy and is thus newsworthy.
It's news because it's been repeated ad nauseam only recruitment, HR, sales and other non tech roles will be affected by layoffs in big tech companies. The numbers aren't important just that there are numbers because it relates to engineering and it's something the tech community didn't expect.
This is a weird take. Are you arguing that we aren't seeing an abnormally high number of layoffs in tech? That this is just "media sensationalism"?
Nearly all the layoff reports I've come across I hear about before they're in the mainstream media. Additionally I predicted months ago that we'd be seeing massive layoffs in tech, before the media was talking about it at all.
These layoffs are real, are atypical for what we've seen the past decade, and are impacting a large number of real devs.
Honestly I haven't even seen the media talking about it until the last few weeks. When I talked about impending tech layoffs back in Oct-Nov nobody outside of the tech community had any idea that there were any issues facing tech.
I hardly see how layoffs are being "played up" rather than just being reported.
The attention that some tech layoffs are getting is often not the norm. It commonly just happens, no announcement is made, and employees know a bunch of people are gone but not much beyond that—aside from some individuals they know aren’t there any longer.
I think it is notable if it’s happening in bulk. Now, it’s not a new phenomenon; it has happened before with major waves of tech layoffs. But not often enough that it should be treated as a law of nature.
This is clearly the "new management trend" for 2023, to the point that what's newsworthy is which tech companies are __not__ laying off 8%-15% of their staff. Maybe we should hear about those.
I love this point: "The tech industry layoffs are basically an instance of social contagion, in which companies imitate what others are doing."
I really wish for a less supine tech press. I've not seen any of these titans of industry being held accountable for the apparent major mistakes of overhiring. And I'm not even talking actual consequences here; these people will surely get bonuses for this. I'd just like to see some hard questions being asked and answered.
Layoffs make news, but if you look at the numbers they are relatively small compared to all the hiring the last few years. We have gone from the best time ever in history to be in IT, to a great time to be in IT. There are a lot of jobs if you step outside big tech (and targeted jobs in big tech with certain skills).
i think layoffs happen much faster than reporting. also, there's just a lot of people out there and tech is only a small piece of the overall labor market.
Why are people still reading tech layoff news and trying to attribute it to specific problems at a company? Remember that Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce, Shopify etc. laid off large chunks of their workforce while collectively making hundreds of billions of dollars in profit. Companies lay off people because they can, simple as that.
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