2020 and 2023 both had serious layoff spikes, but the 2023 spike trailed off to an asymptote that we're still hovering around.
AFAICT, the general populace is anxious about AI. So, the news knows they can get clicks with “You are right to be afraid. AI bad.” Meanwhile, CEOs know they can get stock boosts by saying “We are so AI we don’t need expenses. Infinite ROI!”
Put together we’re getting a ton of scary reporting on what looks like a quite normal business cycle (at least as far as layoffs go). And, everyone being afraid to hire is the only thing actually making it self-fulfilling.
Apparently 20% to be laid off soon.
https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/meta-planning...
WhatsApp can be dubbed a success as well, and Oculus wasn't a flop. And, what does that tell you about the company? They can only acquire and integrate products. Why? Because Leetcode (LC). Fk LC, Hard!!!
But other than that, it was all about working in a digital office, being advertised to, etc. They had this scene where one of Zuck's definitely-real friends is excited about "this new street art" on the digital wall that jumps off the wall and they interact with it. Imagine having popup ads that jump up at you when you're walking (gliding?) down the street!
He’s got one of the biggest free cash flow machines in the world, so he’d rather swing and miss than not swing and be left behind, given that with $200B top line, there is essentially no financial penalty for a swing and a miss.
It does look goofy to have made such a big gamble on something as stupid as Metaverse in hindsight, though.
> increasing addictiveness for the weak minds
This kind of statement is like saying only fools fall for spearphishing attacks. IME, there are lots of attacks on your attention, and it only takes one mistake.
If you have not been targeted yet, it's just a matter of time. For example, look around here at the Factorio users. "It's just a fun game." Ok, but how many hours a week are you spending on it? Looks like an addiction to me.
I know not everybody agrees with me, but when you are logging hundreds (thousands?) of hours on WoW, League, COD, ... it quacks like a duck.
It would be sad if it wasn't so unbelievably destructive to everything it touches.
I tried asking it some technical questions that Gemini can handle just fine, and it quickly started giving false information and contradictions.
The basic issue is none of it seems to be making any money when it ends up in products and services.
Main reason there seems to be that their walled garden approach is tolerated at best. They just aren't very good at it outside of a feed.
As for Meta, I give Mark credit for trying, even if he failed so far with all the VR stuff. The main disappointment is about Llama cause it's clearly an execution problem. With Meta's investments in AI throughout the years, not being able to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI is a big failure.
They'll never be able to explain what they want to the AI, and even if they could, it couldn't solve the problem anyway.
Nevertheless I'm not going to be contracting much longer, I'm writing software by hand to compete with the garbage shat out of Claude's VibeCloaca. I already have customers, I just need to ... tune a few things before I scale, so that I don't have any customer support problems at scale. :)
Well, maybe they can spin up some fake users with all those GPUs to use their shitty site.
(Oh, heh. I just remembered that they actually did that: https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/10/meta-acquired-moltbook-the...)
I’ve worked at a company that pulled the layoff lever a lot but never did the hard work of investing in fixing the broken stuff… the layoffs actually just made everything worse.
If you have a team whose job is to put duct tape on the widget when it leaks, and you lay off most of that team without fixing the widget, your leak gets worse because you have fewer people with duct tape.
What you need is find people who can fix the widget, then fire all the duct tape people.
The health of an organization is often linked in their ability to fire people.
1. Google is getting so much productivity out of their AI that they need fewer people.
2. Google is spending so much on AI they can’t afford to keep the people they need.
3. Google is spending so much on AI that they can't afford to keep paying people, but they are ok with this because they are convinced the AI investment will replace the people at an eventual cost savings.
I guess some of that infrastructure will get used for AI R&D, but there are other R&D costs such as salaries that wouldn't be included in the figure.
Remember before Covid many a company deadweight showing us the vast amounts of unwork they did at their companies on their YouTube videos? Proudly showing how idle they were?
Not all the firings are deadweight but a lot are. There is also a general tightening of budgets and people who are part of dead-end programs that are being let go. When the economy was hotter companies would keep these people to add at the margins; I think now that money is still tight they’re not keeping that luxury.
If interest rates are 3.8%, the company needs at least a 3.8% return every year on your yearly compensation to justify your job.
Grocery stores have slim margins, but if you make 10k after selling 1M worth of stock buy turn over that stock 12 times a year that’s ~12% annual ROI not 1%.
Uber driver does what 2 weeks of work before getting paid, they also front the cost of their car and gas etc. Meanwhile users are paying as soon as the ride occurs.
Now for a consultant the company may get paid after the worker but the company is rarely waiting a more than a few weeks.
Of course this was all predicated on the other prong, which was the 'switch in time that saved 9' where he also threatened to pack the courts to ensure it was found 'constitutional'. FDR was quite ruthless in his destruction of constitutional and democratic controls, and now so much of our government depends on it that it's effectively politically impossible to unwind.
From day one, Social Security was a "new money pays old money" scheme, the one thing that makes it Ponzi-like.
To be fair, the boomers got screwed in the 1980's SS reform to pay for their parents (but had it sweet before), so maybe this is just paying it forward.
Well except for a short period where that was going to be deliberated on by the courts, where they stopped calling it insurance since SCOTUS indicated this insurance wouldn't be constitutional, so instead they put it under general welfare clause but then changed up their rhetoric immediately after it was found constitutional back to it being insurance again.
Also the people that wrote the bill later admitted they intentionally wrote it in a confusing as way to evade public and judicial scrutiny.
reality - companies are choosing to spend money on CAPEX (i.e infrastructure things hoping that they can ride an uncertain wave into the future) and not spend on OPEX (humans)
reality - AI agents are not doing human jobs.
reality - money | debt is now more expensive. hence if you were spending more of it on OPEX stuff you would rather reduce that
reality - more coasting jobs in tech. demand for stuff that still needs to get done is super high - workers just need to get more distributed and not hoarded at the big paying firms
I think AI is being used as an excuse for layoffs rather than the cause. Companies don’t have the cash and times got a bit too rich. This is the cyclical pull back that has been going on for decades.
Not in some AI "dey took er jerbs" kind of way, but because businesses are turning their investment focus towards AI-related ventures, like building data centres, and away from investments that require tech workers. Non-residential construction jobs, for example, have surged.
FWIW, I read this as equating a particular regional accent with stupidity.
I imagine it wasn't intentional, but it's something to consider.
In their defense, they make fun of nearly everyone. But they definitely were mocking White Southerners there.
If you can show that the death of Franz Ferdinand necessarily caused tech layoffs in 2026, I'll listen. I don't think you can, though.
Some of this has nothing to do with COVID boom numbers. Some are bailing water as fast as they can (Atlassian, et al), some are treading water and betting on future returns from AI (Block), etc.
If there really is all this latent untapped need to drive a Jevron's effect software explosion that will keep developers employable, why would so many profitable companies be laying off so many workers into the transition?
The AI caused the developer productivity to increase (similar to other two big SW engineering productivity jumps - compilers and open source), which gives them more leverage over employers (capital). Things that you needed a small team to build (and thus more capital) you can now do in a single person.
In the long run, this will mean more software being written, possibly by even larger number of people (shift on the demand curve - as price of SW goes down demand increases). But before that happens, companies have a knee-jerk reaction to this as they're trying to take back control over developers, while assuming total amount of software will stay constant. Hence layoffs. But I think it's shortsighted, the companies will hurt themselves in the long run, because they will lay off people who could build them more products in the future. (They misunderstood - developers are not getting cheaper, it's the code that will.)
The jig was up when social media like Reddit and tiktok during the pandemic was full of posts with big tech workers gloating about getting hired for six figure salaries to sleep in and play video games at home while putting in 2 hours of work a week, obvious to anyone with two neurons to rub together that it was a too-good-to-be-true unsustainable bubble that's gonna pop and trigger a brutal reset on the job market.
Further reinforced with Elon firing 80% of Twitter and the website didn't stop working, reminding big tech CEOs that they can also start looking into trimming the overhiring fat in their back yard, with no operational loss.
Reinforce that with wall street rewarding mass layoff with share price going up, contrary to the pandemic rewards of shares going up with over hiring, and you have the perfect storm.
AI and the idea of it replacing jobs, has nothing to dow with this, it's just 10 years of ZIRP reawarding every unprofitable bullsit SaaS start-up, and 10 years of "just learn to code bro" where every shoeshine boy became a coder so now tech companies hiring are spoiled for choice.
Edit: Oh I forgot, add to that the increased of offshoring to places with cheaper labor thanks to the normalisation of remote work making it an even perfecter(is that a word?) storm on why an average programmer's labor has way less value.
I'm the last remaining frontend developer after multiple rounds of layoffs. With claude code I'm able to do 2x-3x the work I was able to do before it existed. It's hard for me to rationally argue we need more frontend developers.
What about when you need a day off, or when you quit unexpected?
All there is are layoffs because of interest rates and concerns about the economic outlook. Companies using "AI" as a fig leaf justification and people are apparently falling for it.
Crazy thing is, I delivered optimizations that saved 1m USD over the last 12 months, with another optimization in-flight that would save another 1m USD. I thought that was enough to protect me from layoffs/PIPs - I guess no one was counting.
AI is just an excuse for layoffs which IMO CEOs are trying to use to recover share prices from the SaaS-pocalypse. Looks like layoffs aren't hitting the same for stock prices as they once were.
I got further faster by just answering emails right away than by churning out code. I got constant kudos, which got me promoted, and invited to more meetings, which led to less actual work. All because I just started replying to emails sent to our group. In retrospect it feels pretty perverse.
In lean companies and startups...perhaps not so much.
The reason for this has nothing to do with how productive the devs are per se and everything to do with bloated decision making processes and extremely high communication overhead. “AI” does nothing for that (in fact, I’m seeing integrated suggestions in ticket tracking tools making things spammier and reducing quality of tickets, so if anything, it’s making it worse)