Y'all. It's not eng being laid off. Or, at least, only marginally.

This letter says mainly recruiting and biz depts.

It says those will be “disproportionately affected”, but that could just mean that they represent (say) 10% of the layoffs even though they make up 5% of the team. It doesn't mean that the layoffs are mostly those folks.

Programmers don't make up more 10% of fb's employee base anyway (a guess) so if you assume that fraction at both fb and twitter you're looking at about 1500 additional people looking for jobs not 15000. Suspect this has little to no impact

No, standard is about half of full time employees are programmers. This website has them at about 42%: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/facebook

If that’s the company-wide number, I imagine it’s even higher in the Family of Apps and Reality Labs groups (the ones affected by layoffs), because it doesn’t include cross-org functions like facilities or accounting.

>Programmers don't make up more 10% of fb's employee base anyway (a guess) if you check LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/facebook/people/), about 33% are engineers.

It says about 12k are software engineers. Now it does say 40k total employees instead of the real number but I suspect software engineers are much more likely to be on linkedin. Still fairly confident that its closer to 10% than 33%.

I wonder if comments like yours are said in good faith or in fear or out of pure ignorance. Or all of the above combined.

Proportionally these numbers would not make a difference in a small European country.

These numbers are just the start of the avalanche... There have been a lot of pie-in-the-sky initiatives, especially as the result of the massive cash infusions during Covid.

Now all that easy money is going away.

The current numbers don't mean much, but they're just the start.

That's cyclical, though. The question is always how long the cycle lasts.

True. If recovery is faster than 6-12 months, life is comparatively good.

If recovery starts taking a few years, quality of life drops a lot.

It will probably spill over into the rest of the economy. No matter how generous the severance, a fired worker isn't going to be buying new cars, buying houses, or taking expensive vacations.

The US alone has over 12 million people in tech. This few workers, for a field that has incredibly low unemployment and lots of open positions, is not going to have a problem absorbing newly unemployed.

I would also believe these lay offs are mainly in recruitment and other HR roles and light on the hard core tech roles.

Well Meta severely downsizing their HR department shows you they're not gonna recruit much if at all. It's not a great sign for someone looking for a job...

Honestly, tech companies that were formed in the last decade have very little to show in terms of value creation. Majority are unprofitable. Most will never make profits in a recession AND tighter monetary environments.

At the end of the day, businesses have to generate profits. You can only defer that so long. And most tech companies have been deferring it for a decade now.

I think you are talking smaller tech and theyve been told to chase market share at all costs from VCs and eventually raise prices to get profit. What you will see is more “free/low cost” tech forcing thwir client companies to determine if they will need to buy those services or not as companies change strategies.

Its going to be a tricky dance.

Were you around the dot com crash? It was much worse than what is going on, layoffs happened left and right. But the future would have never been better for tech jobs. So no, incorrect to say anything for sure.

It was a bloodbath. Entire companies vanished like smoke.

I've long argued that it was the "creative destruction" of the dot com crash that made so many of the FAANGs possible.

For instance, Amazon in Seattle benefited as thousands of engineers found themselves out of work in 2000 and 2001.

In addition, AWS was largely inspired by the fact that Sun Microsystems refused to cut their pricing. Amazon was using a lot of Oracle databases and Sun hardware, and when Sun wouldn't negotiate their prices down, Bezos began to figure out A Better Way.

Bezos was particularly irked because there was a flood of practically new Sun hardware available (due to the crash) but Sun wouldn't negotiate on price, despite the market being awash in high quality used hardware.

Basically Bezos didn't want to spend $80,000 on a new Sun server, but he also didn't want to run hardware that was used.