I would say they're just as useful as developers - plenty of developers are bad at their job or are employed extraneously to begin with.
With the exception of some financial services, these do not sound like industries whose companies have large internal IT presence.
The next largest categories are manufacturing/engineering, health, government, and energy. I agree that all of these fit your bill (government, perhaps less so).
sorry, devs are being laid off too, but I understand why HN has hallucinated this rationalization
For the record, I think layoffs of tech employees can also be a good thing (if done right, i.e. solely with respect to performance). Layoffs can be a great opportunity to purge underperforming dead weight employees en masse who have only managed to stick around because the process to PIP them is too onerous.
Sadly, performance did not seem to be the primary criterion for laying people off at many companies.
That's because layoffs are meant to adjust headcount due to changing business conditions (budget, etc). If you're using performance as a criterion, the word you're looking for is "terminated for cause" or "terminated for performance".
A friend of mine leads a department of ~20 people at a midsize company (~1000 employees). They were told late one afternoon that the company was announcing a 10% layoff the following day, that they needed to reduce their departmental payroll accordingly, and to submit a list of employees to lay off by next morning, using performance as the primary criterion for whom to cut. This was feasible and fair, since a manager of 20 people can know exactly how well each of them is performing. (In fact, the employees my friend ended up dismissing were ones they’d wanted to get rid of for a while, but didn’t quite meet the stringent criteria for PIPing, so it was actually a relief to be able to let them go.)
At bigger companies, layoffs cannot get decided with such granularity (decisions come from several levels above managers familiar with each and every employee being laid off), so individual performance is a much smaller factor.
I have met many engineers who thought along the same lines of “technology is the end and sales and product managers are the means to have me do whatever I want to code" and agree that these people struggled in environment focusing on "the customer".
I doubt, that "customer and product centric" companies will become less "customer and product centric".
A reason for the changes we are observing is less access to cheap capital which - as far as I can tell - will shift attention more towards "money, customers and products" and away from "engineering pet projects".
But, perhaps this is a good thing.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13623613198835...
You see this pattern of behaviour in all disciplines, but in tech it seems that social skills are less important than elsewhere so those types are attracted to the field, and we've also cultivated a culture that glorifies people who are assholes but are also visionaries - Jobs/Musk/Zuckerberg etc.
/happily married for 13 years now with two kids so i guess my personality isn't that toxic heh
Unless your mob or pair programming all day most of the week, the actual work involved is rather isolating.
I don't have programmer friends, my friend group has consisted of social people owing to a series of incidental factors that began late in high school. I was consistently the person first to be exhausted going into late night where they seemed to have a replenishing reservoir of energy.
A lot of them were in "tech-adjacent" positions. PM, tech recruiters or evangelists, community managers, sales, DEI folks... At one point one layoff announcement had "returning to a healthy ratio of engineers to non-engineers" as a goal.
[0] https://interviewing.io/blog/2022-layoffs-engineers-vs-other...
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-24/tech-layo...
[2] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3690309/about-those-te...
[3] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-03-0...
[4] https://techreport.com/news/3493451/microsoft-layoffs-ethics...
Does this suggest that the majority of laid off employees were in non-tech roles (e.g. pro{ject,duct} managers, scrum masters, sales, etc.)?
If so, perhaps the layoffs are a good thing—in my experience, the worst tech companies to work for are those dominated by non-technical employees. Perhaps layoffs are being used as a blunt instrument to shift the balance away from that.