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I’d argue that a number of these aren’t tech companies. No more so than any other companies who happen to employ developers.
There are also a few, like Cameo, who can only exist in a boom economy.
Still it’s terrible for the people who are losing their jobs.
Does it matter?
No, not as such, but they say:
> “Stay up-to-date on the latest layoffs across big tech, tech unicorns, and top startups.“
That makes it a weird mix of concerning layoff and layoff that would have happened eventually anyway.
You’re right that it doesn’t matter, so why not include all companies that employ developers and operation people and get a real feel for the current job market?
Also see layoffs.fyi, discussed ~3 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31301646
Snap got absolutely destroyed in the markets a few days back, so I just casually looked at some of their stats. They have 6000 (!) employees, a market cap of $20bln (after losing 40% of their value in a day) and a PE ratio of 53.
There is such an inordinate amount of bloat in the tech sector that it boggles the mind.
Money was being blasted at tech through a firehose of epic proportions. Once that stops, my gut feeling is that a lot of companies are going to have to undergo massive layoffs.
I have zero quantitative evidence for this but IMO less than half the engineers are actually needed to run these businesses.
What happens with the other half is anyone's guess.
Way less than half the engineers are needed to keep the lights on.
Keeping the lights on isn't enough. You want to grow. You have competitors that will do more than keep the lights on to take your market share.
I'd argue many (most?) of these companies do not innovate or grow. What innovation has come out of Snap/TikTok/Twitter/{insert name here}?
They make one product, get ballooned up with endless cash (or used to) and then do nothing for years because they don't really need to do anything as long as money keeps flowing.
I'd argue many (most?) of these companies have so many employees not because they need all that manpower, but because the majority of management is engaged in empire building. As a department head/PM, more headcount = more power = more prestige = even more headcount = ...
I'd therefore argue that less than half the engineers are needed even if these companies wanted to grow. They only have so many employees because they had more cash than what they could put into actual innovation.
You can see this everywhere. Very smart PHDs get hired all over the place for very impressive salaries and the vast majority of them do absolutely useless busywork at best.
We saw this to be categorically not the case with Twitter.
No competition despite nothing but network effects preventing competitors from emerging, lots of engineers, lots of time, and no added features. The engineers did BS useless work or worse, did nothing the past several years.
what's the engineering to employee ratio at companies like snap?
Coinbase: 5000 employees, $18B market cap
What are 5,000 employees even doing at Coinbase?
A lot of tech companies have a negative PE. In that context, a 53 PE doesn’t seem so bad.
"Bloomberg News is laying off nearly 100 journalists as it restructures its newsroom"
Not really a tech layoff. Many more similar examples. Also counting companies rather than jobs doesn't make sense. And the job data is likely centrally collected on FRED.
Tech is a broad field. In news reporting, use of ML is ubiquitous at this point and many roles require strong technical background and development experience. Journalists are only a small part of the newsroom
Bloomberg relies on a lot of tech and engineers. Maybe not the News arm, but it’s related enough to Bloomberg that it’s worth calling it a “tech layoff”
Tech companies are like lewdness, we know them when we see them. I’m sure Maersk and Walmart rely a lot on tech and engineers, but no one is calling them tech companies.
Does it matter? The relevant part (to most of us) is whether they're laying off engineers. Almost any company is a tech company these days
Walmart is as tech as Amazon retail. There is a reason products have barcodes.
And that reason is IBM
Is it? I'd always heard Walmart was the first adopter of barcodes at scale.
EDIT: TIL -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcode
On 20 October 1949, Woodland and Silver filed a patent application for "Classifying Apparatus and Method", in which they described both the linear and bull's eye printing patterns, as well as the mechanical and electronic systems needed to read the code. The patent was issued on 7 October 1952 as US Patent 2,612,994.[1] In 1951, Woodland moved to IBM and continually tried to interest IBM in developing the system. The company eventually commissioned a report on the idea, which concluded that it was both feasible and interesting, but that processing the resulting information would require equipment that was some time off in the future.
IBM offered to buy the patent, but the offer was not accepted. Philco purchased the patent in 1962 and then sold it to RCA sometime later.
Yes, but in this case it explicitly says it is not a tech layoff. So the possible relevance is denied at source.
It would be nice if it included info on how many of the layoffs are technical people. I know of layoffs here in EU, but it was UX, product, etc. Seems like techies are still in demand.
From many (most?) outside perspectives, technical product and UX are “technical people”.
If you move your mouse between two of the boxes the tooltip goes crazy and opens and closes in a loop very quickly.
This is interesting to see. Does feel like most of the companies here got a nice boost during the pandemic. As things change again they need to lose weight?
feels like a lot of non tech companies also FOMOed into hiring tech people because they got scared of the "everything will be online" narrative during the pandemic. Now they're maybe beginning to realize that they don't need that many tech people and that maybe the economy isn't going to fundamentally change that drastically after all
This is not pandemic related it is cost of money related.
As interest rates go up to tackle inflation the era of free money is over and the bubble bursts.
I think the fact that companies like Klarna are downsizing is good overall. Klarna literally offers nothing but interest free loans (3 instalments typically), and they tear out your eyeballs if you miss the payments with ridiculous interest rates. Their normal business model makes zero profit, and they solely depend on people missing payments so they can gouge them. Clearly not viable at all...
Isn't that how most lending works? Exceptions exist on student loans and mortgages but most lending is predatory in nature in the same way described.
Buy-Now Pay-Later is largely unregulated (in the UK at least) and makes money off predatory tactics. I make no comment on the ethics of staff that choose to work for VC-backed loan sharks other than to say if you've been let go it might be a good chance to reassess priorities.
This is just wrong. BNPL is not their only product, and their profit comes from transaction fees paid by merchants.
A piece of news about Fast is listed twice, once under Fast and once under Fastly. I’m not aware of any Fastly layoffs.
I wonder if the creator of this site is hiring...