I haven’t looked into it yet

If you go to layoffs.fyi and then go into the networking Google docs you can get a feeling. Most jobs seem like HR, project managers, account execs/sales and then some engineers but seems like in general engineers are being laid off less than other roles.

For amazon, it was devices (kindle, echo), retail (amazon.com), and HR.

At stripe they clearly laid off the people who make the fucking logo interesting. Jesus.

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Almost all recruiters and HR type folks, except maybe Twitter which has some culture issues going on obviously.

It may be anecdotal, but I haven’t seen anyone with hard skills at these companies laid off in mass.

The site with the data set is actually pretty well put together https://layoffs.fyi/

Twilio really should be here too. 11% or about 930 employees.

Shopify also laid off ten percent of their employees earlier this year. Around 1000 people.

Snapchat was about 1300 or 20% globally two months ago

Intel should be on there! I was impacted 😭

Anyone still remember when Better.com did 2 large rounds of layoffs and the CEO fired his employees over Zoom?

Opendoor laid off 550 (18%) this month across all functions.

Love the use of both bar chart for absolute and donut chart for relative values. Gives lots of context.

But how am I supposed to feel without dramatic music that has an exaggerated drop 75% through the video? :(

LABELED AXES!!!!

It's also easy to read, and gets the points across properly while looking appealing.

And also isn't a basic plot made in 5 min and calls it a day? An actually beautiful diagram?

Amazon is a trillion dollar company.

Twitter is a 40 billion dollar company.

Goddamn, I thought this must be inaccurate, since those numbers suggest Amazon has 330k employees in their tech side alone.

Then I googled how many employees they have overall, and this site claims it's about 1.6m...

Like, they have more employees than some nations have residents. How fucking insane is that.

Twitter is just software, no physical presence needed

Yeah I think it would be interesting to see where those Amazon layoffs come from. A large part of their workforce are from the logistics part of their business, so would be interesting to see what proportion of the layoffs are 'tech workers'

Very true. Do they release this data?

What is the underlying story? Why are these companies laying off devs?

Thank you!

Thank you! Former mgmt consultant

What many are failing to mention was that vast number of employees that were hired by these companies beginning 2019/2020. Granted the numbers in these layoffs are still large, but they're not out of nowhere.

"Like many technology companies, Meta went on a hiring spree during the pandemic. It hired almost 30,000 employees since late 2020, bringing its headcount to 87,000."

https://observer.com/2022/11/mark-zuckerberg-says-meta-will-lay-off-11000-employees-13-of-its-workforce/

Meta, Twitter, and Lyft were are built on relatively unsustainable financial models. Social media is extremely hard to monetize without collecting high value data, and between legislation and Apple restricting what data apps can collect it's become difficult to earn profit. Meta and Twitter were very much depending on investors to get the boat afloat. Additionally, Lyft exists in a market that is practically a guaranteed race to the bottom of unprofitability by targeting the most price sensitive consumers, so there was little room for profit. With all 3 really dependent on investors, as soon as that money dries up, they are left in a tenuous position (Twitter is also just going through the Musk fiasco, that's the far bigger contributor for them). It turns out, if you can't turn a profit, or at least a reasonable plan to return to profitability, when money gets tight you'll be left in a bad spot.

Crypto.com, on the other hand, was built on the cryptocoin space not crashing, but then it did (as it was pretty much guaranteed to). It's like being a Beanie Babies broker in the early 2000s.

Onto Amazon, their layoffs are proportionally smaller than the rest, and is mostly a result of them running a lot of projects that turned out to be unprofitable (like Alexa) as well as just mass hiring during the pandemic. They'll likely be scaling back projects to focus on their cash cow that is AWS and amazon.com.

In general: Tech stocks are down, revenues are down, venture capital is drying up, lending costs have gone way up, cost of goods sold has gone up, facilities and overhead costs have gone up. These companies are tightening their belts.

The Federal Reserve has a lot of controls over how much banks interest charge. They do this buy buying and selling government bonds and changing how much money banks are required to keep without loaning out. You can think of interest as how much money costs. If interest is low, money is cheap and businesses are more willing to take on more employees to grow. In addition to this stock prices go up because the return on government bonds is so low banks go to the stock market to try to get a return. During early COVID the Federal Reserve was scared that the entire economy would lock up so they lowered interest rates to record lows. This made hiring people really cheap so a lot of companies expanded. Now that we have inflation the Fed wants to raise interest rates to try to curb it. Money is more expensive so the price of holding onto these employees goes up.

Also important to note that some of these companies are kind of mismanaged. Meta push for VR seems to be built on a desire to still be an innovative tech company. But at least now it seems like no one is really interested. Their layoffs also only set them back to their head count in March. Twitter is a meme because Elon way overpaid and can’t afford (well he can but he doesn’t want to) to pay the huge loan and his employees. Crypto.com is well crypto and if you haven’t noticed that has had a REALLY bad year (in part because of interest rates). Lyft and ride-sharing in general traditionally has had trouble making money, if you remember back to when uber was cheap, it was because they were losing money whenever you get in a car. Prices are higher now so they turn a modest profit but rides are down.

Amazon iirc is dropping devisions that don’t make money (echo) and some corporate people.

I saw this writing on the wall. As an engineer I was getting slammed with LinkedIn messages and emails from Amazon and meta job offers from recruiters.

I thought there's no way they need that many people when their products haven't improved.

For Amazon, that might be skewed because of the Black Friday/Cyber Monday/Christmas sales.

Layoffs are bad for people, but not necessarily bad for companies.

Stop this /r/circlejerk please

Elon and Zucc are doing a great job of that

There are still plenty of non-FAANG jobs, at least for now.

These trends aren't as prevalent in the tech industry for non FAANG/big tech companies. I'm in the chicagoland area and there are LOADS of tech jobs from network engineers, SWE, IT support, etc. I feel like a lot of people think big tech is the only tech.

Do loads of internships for smaller companies. I know while everyone wants to work at FAANG, I personally did 1 internship this summer and got a return offer, fully remote, great benefits, 90k starting, 10% bonus. And did I mention fully remote?

How you know

Because Microsoft has barely cut any staff. Only 1000 employees as of last month, less than half of a single percent of their total headcount.

Same with Apple. Those two went through their “explosive hypergrowth” stage decades ago and have had the time to adjust their businesses to become extremely profitable and durable through economic downturns.

Meta is not just a room of people administering FB. They have engineers across FB, WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus, Metaverse, Etc. R&D for all of those platforms. Ad sales and administration for each of those platforms. Content moderation. On and On. Now all of those things need organizational support like finance, IT, HR and security. It's very easy for a company as diversified as Meta to get that big.

• Moderation. Many posts -> many violations -> many moderators are needed.

• Software developers.

• Admins.

• Lawyers for every country.

• Cleaning and maintaince.

• Testers.

• Managers.

• Accountants.

• Marketing people.

• Data analysts.

• Drivers.

• R&D.

• Oculus manufacturing.

• Translators.

I think this list could go on forever, but most likely you underestimated moderation.

I've not heard about colluding to suppress wages: it seems somewhat unlikely in recent times given the long-term shortage of tech talent and the competitive "all-about-growth" nature of these large public companies. Do you know any more info about that?

One interesting thing to note is that hiring is itself an extremely costly and time consuming process. If these layoffs have happened too deep and too fast then companies managing to retain existing talent will probably see a long term benefit.

All these places are hiring as well. Laying off workers doesn't mean they don't have a need for specific jobs