In 2021, the tech industry was booming. Supported by generous government subsidies and a pandemic economy, tech companies have hired employment and promised unlimited leave in open offices where Kombucha and Cold Brew were flowing from TAPS.
Once you flash them, those taps are dry. A seemingly endless wave of massive layoffs is destroying the tech industry as startups surge and the tech giants pushed their operating budget into AI furnaces.
And of all the workers destroyed by the massacre, former tech workers in Silicon Valley make it particularly rough.
Former software engineers and developers in the region were previously thought to be Ironclad – must compete with a fiercely competitive job market in one of the world’s most expensive housing markets yeah.
Many people are actually considering leaving the industry forever, like managing engineer Daelynn Moyer. The 55-year-old, lifelong tech worker told the Washington Post he was considering selling her home and retiring to the farm early after 160 job applications went anywhere.
“It’s a small presence, but it’s going to be fulfilling,” Moyer told the paper. “I don’t feel like a useless product anymore.”
Moyer is not alone. Industry events are becoming a desperate job fair filled with unemployed tech workers tired of rejection emails.
Many people take them to social media and share the misery of working with the former high-tech worker masses. “I want to move on from Tech,” one Reddit account commented in a thread about layoffs. “I’ve been burned out with a long interview process and then rejection. It physiologically caused some degree of damage to me.”
Another posted post, “Lessons I learned from my tech layoffs,” remarked, “I didn’t know who I was after I was fired. Looking at myself in the mirror and introducing myself to myself. Could not. Value. ‘”
Unfortunately, for American tech workers, layoff trains have not slowed down.
Yesterday, Meta kicked off “thousands of layoffs,” which amounted to about 5% of its staff, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg vowing to replace it with an AI system. And last week, Google offered workers’ retirements in exchange for voluntary layoffs, signaling its intention to close the already integrated hardware division, which had experienced hundreds of layoffs last spring.
Layoffs are ubiquitous in all layers of technology, but they are particularly insidious coming from the grand Seven – stock trader terminology for tech giants Apple, Microsoft, Google (Alphabet), Nvidia, Tesla, Amazon and Meta – It is more valuable than the UK, Canada, Germany and French stock markets. This combines the entire Chinese stock market, the second largest in world history.
Put it all together. And the industry, which has been at the top of the world recently, has been feeling some serious crunch. And that’s what rank and file is now taking the brunt of it, but how deep the cut will be, especially as the tech sector seems to be succumbing to hell for now to pour money into artificial intelligence. I don’t know yet.
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