This year is shaping up to be the worst time for white-collar tech workers since the dot-com bubble burst.

Even before Amazon began laying off about 10,000 corporate employees on Wednesday, the job-loss numbers within the tech sector were grim. Just recently: Meta laid off 11,000 people, Stripe and Microsoft and Snap all axed about 1,000 employees each, Salesforce and Zillow let go of hundreds of workers, and Twitter cut about half of its 7,500-strong workforce. (And that was before Twitter cut thousands of content-moderation contractors, and before new owner Elon Musk fired 20 staffers for expressing their dissatisfaction with him.) According to data gathered by the website Layoffs.fyi, at least 86,700 tech jobs within the U.S. have been lost this year alone. There will be more to come.

In a time of scuttled prospects, high costs of living, economic slowdown, and general labor-market weirdness, where will the tens of thousands of newly displaced tech workers go? Tech may be contracting, but as of now, the rest of the economy is still hiring. And that’s where the former employees of Meta, Twitter, and Amazon may need to go.

The United States’ move-fast-and-break-things tech scene is finally slowing down and picking up some pieces, thanks to high interest rates, shrinking market potential, and dried-up investment. Some industry executives have also cited overenthusiasm for hiring—especially during the pandemic—and misplaced optimism for further sector growth as factors. “It has become fashionable for VCs to talk about how all these tech companies are overstaffed,” wrote Emily Mazo, an organizer with the labor advocacy group Collective Action in Tech, in an email. “Any of the workers who just got laid off will likely tell you that they were in fact understaffed, that they were working much more than 40 hours a week even before half their teams were fired, and that they have long lists of things they wanted to build but didn’t have the hands for. But workers are the first ones to be hurt in a downturn moment.”

Many of these coders, engineers, information analysts, designers, and recruiters who flocked to Silicon Valley in the 2010s are now facing a very different job market. Several firms that haven’t announced plans for layoffs are either slowing their hiring or freezing new positions altogether. At the same time, some workers are increasingly concerned about employer ethics and thinking twice about which companies they consider. Plus, any available jobs within the industry aren’t likely to include the same perks they once offered—in-office luxuries, generous financial benefits and leave policy, discounted travel costs—because of lot of those are being slashed, too.

news source: https://slate.com/technology/2022/11/tech-jobs-hiring-amazon-meta-twitter-layoffs.html