The U.S. economy is booming. So why are tech companies laying off workers?
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SAN FRANCISCO - The first time Julian Chavez got laid off from his job as a digital ad sales rep at web.com didn’t turn him off from the tech industry. Neither did the second time when he was laid off from ZipRecruiter. By the third time, though, Chavez had had enough. “I really loved what I did,” said Phoenix-based Chavez in a text message. “But the layoffs got me jaded.” Now he’s pursuing a graduate degree in psychology.Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesti

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The first time Julian Chavez got laid off from his job as a digital ad sales rep at web.com didn’t turn him off from the tech industry. Neither did the second time when he was laid off from ZipRecruiter. By the third time, though, Chavez had had enough.

“I really loved what I did,” said Phoenix-based Chavez in a text message. “But the layoffs got me jaded.” Now he’s pursuing a graduate degree in psychology.

Chavez is one of hundreds of thousands of tech workers who’ve been laid off in the past two years in what now seems like a never-ending wave of cuts that has upended the culture of Silicon Valley and the expectations of those who work at some of America’s richest and most powerful companies.

Last year, tech companies laid off more than 260,000 workers according to layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi, cuts that executives mostly blamed on “over-hiring” during the pandemic and high interest rates making it harder to invest in new business ventures. But as those layoffs have dragged into 2024 despite stabilizing interest rates and a booming job market in other industries, the tech workforce is feeling despondent and confused.

The U.S. economy added 353,000 jobs in January, a huge boost that was around twice what economists had expected. And yet, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Discord, Salesforce and eBay all made significant cuts in January, and the layoffs don’t seem to be abating. On Tuesday, PayPal said in a letter to workers it would cut another 2,500 employees or about 9 percent of its workforce.

The continued cuts come as companies are under pressure from investors to improve their bottom lines. Wall Street’s sell-off of tech stocks in 2022 pushed companies to win back investors by focusing on increasing profits, and firing some of the tens of thousands of workers hired to meet the pandemic boom in consumer tech spending. With many tech companies laying off workers, cutting employees no longer signaled weakness. Now, executives are looking for more places where they can squeeze more work out of fewer people.

  • JeffKerman1999
    3·
    10 months ago

    I just got fired for this exact reason: too many tickets in the queue and all of them highest priority. And I’m not talking about stuff that you can do in 10 minutes.

    • Blackbeard@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      10 months ago

      That sucks so much, and I’m sorry you had to go through that. My spouse got fired for “failing to prioritize”, which is corporate speak for exactly the same thing. Meanwhile she spent almost 2 years telling her boss she needed more help to get everything done, and they refused to give her a direct report. So when they told her to “delegate better”, she simply responded with, “who the fuck am I supposed to delegate to?” It’d be hilarious if it weren’t so sad.

      Hope you get back on your feet soon. It’s a jungle out there right now.

      • JeffKerman1999
        1·
        10 months ago

        Yep, same thing here. Some dude was supposed to be my help but he was redirected to do some hardware support stuff on premises and completely disappeared between customers… So yeah whatever, I have two months of garden leave and I’m already relaxed like I wasn’t in two years (yeah on vacation I got emails and calls about problems that could have been solved by that dude if he read the wiki… with the result that I was never on vacation but always on edge).

    • KneeTitts@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      10 months ago

      I just got fired for this exact reason: too many tickets in the queue

      Wouldnt too many tickets in the queue mean the company needs… more people?? Not less??? How do they Ever plan to get the tickets completed with less people???

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
      3·
      10 months ago

      I was in this a few years back at a dotcom: too many tickets.

      I’d have weekly meets with my boss where I just said “order these, and understand the bottom third may never get done”.

      And I’d confirm the ordering in email so it was written down.

      It helped when someone would ask “hey what’s with the Penske File” and I could say “Marty said I have this other stuff to do first. Sorry man.”

      It kept me alive longer than two of my peers, anyway. But I eventually left because Marty was a challenge to work with and life’s too short to get blindsided.