Hi folks, Kylie Robison with the tech team here. Today, I'm thinking about how quickly time flies.
In 2021, there were tales of wily software engineers juggling multiple remote jobs, while Meta and Google engaged in an arms race for top talent, turning mere idleness into a high-six-figure endeavor. The Coronavirus pandemic ended up being a money-printing machine for much of corporate America, with 52% of companies seeing a bigger profit in November 2020 than the year prior, Axios reported. Then there was the Great Resignation—workers quitting their jobs in pursuit of fatter paychecks—which now appears unheard of amidst the seismic upheaval of nationwide layoffs.
Meta has since let go of more than 20,000 employees, Google laid off 12,000, Microsoft cut 10,000, Amazon reduced its workforce by 19,000, and Elon Musk downsized Twitter's staff by over 80%—a true industry-wide shakeup. If you're not familiar with Austin Nasso, a comedian known for roasting techies, his joke about being a Meta employee is right on the money, no pun intended.
"Everybody's getting laid off one by one, when I joined Meta in September 2021 I was making like 550k total comp now it's down like 265k, I don't even know how I'm gonna afford the mortgage payments on my tiny home in Tahoe," he said in an Instagram Reel. "They promised me haircuts. They said free food. They said I could code for 30 minutes a day, but now I just feel like every thing is going to shit and they say Zuckerberg is replacing us with large language models!"
Indeed, the era of tech employees reveling in minimal effort for maximal gains appears to have run its course. I once attempted to write an article about this, sparked by a Salesforce staffer who drunkenly confessed to me at a San Francisco party that he does no work but still gets so much money. However, when dawn sobered his perspective, he wasn't eager to resurrect that anecdote for an article in Fortune.
While those days seem to be over for most, and techies scavenge for whatever free office snacks they can still find at whatever offices haven't been shuttered, a new trend appears to be taking shape. Tech layoffs are tapering off, now at their lowest since February 2022, according to Layoffs.fyi, a website that has dutifully tracked tech layoffs over the pandemic. What's more, Insider reported that tech analysts at Bernstein Research, who tracked industry layoffs every month for about a year, have now officially ended this data series and claimed that "The Tech Job Recession is Over" in a recent email to clients.
The final curtain may not have completely descended on tech layoffs—Niantic, Discord, and Salesforce all handed out pink slips this month. But given how many tech giants sought to rip the band-aid off earlier this year by eliminating thousands of workers from their payrolls, it's possible that the worst of the tech job recession is behind us. Also, as Insider pointed out, OpenAI has 60 open roles as of Tuesday. Then there's the obscene $900,000 A.I. gig at Netflix that made its rounds. Could A.I. turn out to be the very lifeline that preserves engineers' livelihoods, instead of replacing them? That would be an ironic twist!
Here’s what else is going on in tech today.
Kylie Robison
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