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this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2024
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Laying people off instead of offering to move them to the now-more-important projects has to be one of the dumbest management moves that tech companies repeatedly do. These are people already trained on all the policies and procedures and tooling and "culture" specific to your company.
It's going to be more expensive to hire and train new people when the dumdums in upper management finally figure out the mistakes they made that got them to a point where they decided they need to cut jobs and projects, and the ramp-up time before you actually start seeing progress on those priorities is going to be seriously lengthened. Of course they won't acknowledge it was their fault in the first place, and again the heads roll on the wrong end of the corporate ladder.
They are not stupid at all. Their interests are in conflict with the interests of tech workers and they are winning effortlessly, over and over again.
The big tech companies are all owned by the same people. If these layoffs cause google to lose market share to another company, it's fine because they own that company too.
What matters is coordinating regular layoffs across the whole industry to reduce labour costs. It's the same principle as a strike: if the whole industry does layoffs, workers gradually have to accept lower salaries. In other words, the employers are unionised and the employees are not.
This process will probably continue for the next 20 years, until tech workers have low salaries and no job security. It has happened to countless industries before, and I doubt we are special.
I'm sure the next big industries will be technology-focused, but that's not the same as "tech". They won't involve people being paid $200k to write websites in ruby.
That's why we need to negotiate in block, likely through unions.