The Brutal Truth Behind Tech Layoffs

welcome to my channel my name is Josh and today I'm going to be talking about the major layoffs happening in Tech and what I think is actually the cause behind them let's get started the first thing I want to talk about is what's been kind of on everybody's mind which is AI you always constantly see articles and people talking now everywhere around the internet about how AI is going to replace programming jobs now I'm probably going to have to make a totally separate video about this particular topic because it's such a big topic um but the truth is I think that is a pretty minor reason why people are being laid off right now when we look at the big tech companies which I'm going to get into in a minute um and why they're doing these huge layoffs I think there's something maybe much deeper that's rotten at the core and I think probably the most significant things are things people aren't really talking about or thinking about so I'm going to get into that in a few minutes but I just want to kind of get get the AI out of here for the moment if you've ever used Google bard or if you've ever used chat GPT to actually program and make stuff you would know that it's not going to replace programmers anytime soon actually AI isn't new we talk about it like it's new because it's finally um it's gaining Public Access right people are finally able to use it to write stories to plagiarize things whatever um but when we really look at AI it's been used for well over 20 years in Aviation it's been used for uh routing pathing all sorts of stuff it's just finally people and the public have access so they seem to think it's this new thing well no it's been replacing jobs for decades it's not really new and it's not going to replace programmers anytime soon not in entirely at least if you work and you know let's say you are a web developer that does HTML CSS and that's it yeah there's a possibility your job could be in danger maybe eventually but uh certainly not anytime soon and people that do hardcore logic anything lowlevel anything crer assemblers AI is just super inaccurate plus the other thing too is the way AI works is it just resources public knowledge right AI doesn't really creatively solve problems the way people seem to think it does it tries to solve problems Based on data sets that are already developed which means it can really only effectively solve problems that have already been solved and the whole point of hiring a programmer for the most part um is that your company or your needs are going to be specific to that product now I make games that's my job I've tried to use AI to help with my game development especially like hardcoree logic programming problems and I've just found it's just not very good sometimes it's helpful on some things it's a good resource for a programmer to have but it is not going to be replacing programmers dramatically anytime soon it is a small factor it is part of the reason why some companies are looking to the Future and saying we need to start laying off unnecessary staff because in the future and they're anticipating that uh this may replace certain jobs but again I think this is kind of a very small part of the reason why some people are being replaced so I just wanted to kind of get that out of the way get your concerns out of the way again I'll make a whole video on this and why it's not going to replace people not truly uh later but you don't need to worry about AI That's not the major factor here so another thing that it could possibly be is preparation for a looming recession most people that work in economics will tell you as we speak you see it all over the news that a recession is probably coming stock values can only go up so high for so long before something has to collapse right it's just it's it's the rules of entropy or gravity things can only get better and go up and then eventually they have to come down we look at interest rates for example and that's a good place to start your search if you think there's an economic recession coming soon professionals and people that are analysts see interest rates and they see that as a concern companies of course hire their own economists and the economists are going to be going to the CEOs and going to the CTO and people that handle handle hiring hiring managers hiring departments hiring companies whoever they Outsource that to and they're going to say look a recession is coming we need to start doing minor layoffs slowly and we have seen some of those but again of these big major layoffs that we're seeing right now I don't think that this is the biggest factor I do think it's a factor just like AI is a factor but it's not the big one so that's the thing I want to get into now as I start to talk about this and as I start to go deeper into the problem it's going to become more clear the more you start to look at people's critical roles in their company the real and major factor that's causing a lot of these layoffs I really do seem to think is being overlooked because people are so used to the way the tech industry works now that nobody seems to question it anymore what's been happening in Tech about the last 20 years is what I like to call a hyp specialization for roles right 20 or 30 years ago if you were a programmer and you knew a couple programming languages or maybe even one maybe you were a generalist you could get basically any programming job companies were hiring based on the fact that you knew how to program and that you understood logic and you understood generally speaking how computer science works and how to make products that are useful for that company that's not how it works anymore because somewhere along the way big companies like Facebook um I think Snapchat is a particular offender I'll talk about that that in a minute um they started to realize that they could grow their companies artificially if they started hiring more people than they really need most tech companies most social networks could be managed by shockingly small teams of programmers now I'm not talking about legal I'm not talking about HR resources other things that are considerations as well but just the actual Tech that goes into an app for iOS let me give you an example say Instagram or SnapChat I think it would surprise most people how few programmers it actually takes a lot of these social networks were developed originally by one person but now for some reason you look at a company like Snapchat who even uses Snapchat anymore they still have something like 6,000 employees why do you need 6,000 employees I could understand having a few dozen programmers but they have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of programmers not to mention all they legal and everything else so what we're seeing is a hyp specialization of roles and companies are doing this to prop up stock values the core here is it's a type of invisible and legal fraud if you keep growing your company by just hiring more people and then investors and people that frankly don't know a lot about tech think that's necessary they see that as positive indicators so your goal if you're Mark Zuckerberg is to make your company as valuable as as possible to stock investors not to the public Facebook doesn't even need to make very much money at all the the key to Facebook being valuable and more specifically Mark Zuckerberg being valuable is doing what investors want and what lenders want and they want to see Positive Growth constantly in the industry we call this employee farming so the idea behind employee farming is as long as you keep growing your worker base it looks like your company's growing it looks like you need to hire those people and therefore again bigger company means bigger stock valuations it means lenders and um investors see you as this better growing big future company even if it's not and this is ultimately what's leading to this hypers specialization because they have to keep creating new roles and when you look at these videos and I'm sure you've all seen them by now people mocking them constantly on the internet but you look at these videos of these girls and guys who work in this hyp specialized role uh posting videos on Tik Tok talk and they post videos on Twitter of like my my day at Twitter or uh my a day in the life of a Twitter HR engineer or something like that and it's basically the girl or guy just drinking coffee hanging around chilling out they they show themselves sleeping in these pods that they have now they're really not doing much and again this is the result of hyp specialization they were basically just creating BS jobs and now you have a bunch of people sitting around who don't work like once you have a hundred programmers you're done you're not doing anything more useful beyond that maybe you could have people in specialized roles outside of the tech again people like legal and HR but we are seeing jobs for button Engineers like literally they want you to specialize not just in programming but specialize in making a button do you know how many people work at Snapchat for example Snapchat has like I said early about 6,000 employees but they have over 400 employees that just work on UI that's it they do nothing but UI the entire UI of Snapchat could easily be done by a handful of professionals if not less if not one person probably if you've ever actually used Snapchat you know it's awful anyways the whole UI is just a complete disaster there is no reason to have 400 people working on the UI they don't even have 400 buttons there's something like 30 or 40 buttons on the whole app that's more than 10 people for each button that the app has and each function but they do it because the company is forced into this cycle of infinite growth and then other companies are doing it so they have to compete or else they look like they're small and shrinking and they lose value in investors as people Port elsewhere but we're just seeing massive hyp specialization for roles that probably shouldn't even exist to begin with and when we start to look at that problem we start to see why tech companies are doing massive layoffs of a very big reason for this is the Catalyst event which was of course Elon buying Twitter I'm going to get into that in just a minute too so now as we start to see negative indicators in stock value AI future growth things like that suppe really you know look at meta they tried to do this whole metaverse thing that failed lost billions of dollars now they know okay we need to recoup some of that money and the best way to do it is to start firing these people or doing layoffs of them that we never really needed to begin with so a lot of people have this sort of idea that oh programmers are all just getting fired now no they're not good programmers are not getting fired not predominantly at least except maybe at Unity but that's a different topic but the idea here is that if you're a good programmer you're going to have a stable job you're needed there's tons of companies that are still growing that are still bringing in new programmers you don't need to worry you only need to worry if you're one of the people that's getting hired in something super hypers specialized and that's why I still recommend to people to be generalists be a good programmer who knows lots of Frameworks who knows lots of languages who understands computer science intimately because that makes you a valuable resource they're not just going to fire you or get rid of you you have an intrinsic value when you bring something to the table Beyond just being able to make one tiny button on the interface when you really fundamentally understand how apps work and are designed when you understand core architecture you are never ever going to be out of work and if you do get fired because a company goes under or something you're going to find work really fast as well so you shouldn't wor about that I I see too many people panicking in the industry right now the people getting fired are in almost every case I've seen the jobs that never should have existed to begin with and I don't mean to insult those people many of those people are generalists that ended up being forced into a specialization just to get a job because these companies don't want to hire generalists right these companies want to hire people in specific subsets because then they don't complain they don't whine about wanting to do better bigger things they get comfortable in the rule they get comfortable in the fact that they don't have to do very much and I think that that's just convenient for the industry it's convenient for this type of mass hiring fraud which is what I considered it I know they they just call it employee farming but I call it employee fraud because ultimately this is bad for the companies because they do do major layoffs and then they lose stock value because people think the company's shrinking so it's bad for them and it's bad for employees because you never feel like you're stable you feel like you work on things that don't matter so you're just a cog in the well oiled machine if you want to even call it that more like a brick in the wall you're a brick in the wall of this machine like at meta or Facebook and you just feel like you don't matter you feel like your job is what I think Joe Rogan had a podcast on this actually called BS jobs um but that's that's ultimately What's led to this is is way way over hiring and super specified jobs that they don't need when you hire a generalist they can replace 50 or 60 of those minor jobs that you just you don't need if you were a good leader you wouldn't do that I think another thing to talk about too that people are ignoring is even beyond the intentional fraud that's happening a lot of CEOs just aren't good they're just not good at their job they're kind of hands off they just push everything on other people and I've seen this personally too my wife worked for a small company that had maybe 10 or 12 employees at one point and they were growing a little bit but the CEO just wanted to constantly hire more people for everything like they are 12 person small Nimble light company and she wanted to hire an entire social media development company to post posts on LinkedIn for them they're 12 people the CEO should just make a LinkedIn and start posting posts they were hiring a Social Development firm for these tiny what I would consider to be kind of worthless posts basically something you could have just gone on AI and had chat GPT right for you um so I think a lot of CEOs are just bad with money I think their hands off they don't want to wear many hats they just want to rely on other people too much and people that aren't sort of micromanagers tend to be like that and you know micromanaging is its own problem of course trying to do everything yourself is its own issue that's kind of a separate topic but good lean startups understand where to spend money and where not to waste money and I find there's just way too much especially with these big companies of hands-off approach let's hire somebody for literally everything we need to have more people in the industry who know how to wear mini hats so don't be afraid to be a programmer that has maybe 10 Frameworks under their tool belt right you know how to use a lot of Frameworks you know how to use um a lot of languages and you understand architecture so that should be your focus if you want to become a programmer and you're concerned about these Tech layoffs one of the biggest catalysts we've seen in this industry was Elon buying Twitter now say what you will about him positively or negatively affecting the platform but I will tell you this I do use Twitter I am on X uh X now as it's called sorry um and it seems to me as though when he first bought it and fired 70% of the staff things were shaky at first um but I think he tried to prioritize getting rid of the jobs all these hyp specializations that don't matter and keeping the good programmers that actually matter and actually fundamentally understand the architecture of how Twitter's actually built and now what we're seeing is Twitter's faster than ever before when I use Twitter now it's way less bloated it's lighter than it's ever been there's some things I don't like about it I think Bots are maybe worse than ever like that's been a big prioritization is uh make people pay and then that'll eliminate Bots that that has not worked um so not everything Elon has done has worked but he managed to fire 71% that's what we know of it might actually be a bigger number than that but at least 71% of the employees there was something like 8,000 and it's around 2,000 now and it's still operating fine yeah there were some Growing Pains at first or shrinking pains at first but it's working other tech companies looked at this they saw how many literally millions of dollars a month in operating cost it's saving them getting rid of all these employees now other companies are going like well you know stock evaluation does matter um but making Money Matters too and that also affects stock evaluation so I think other people especially CEOs now are starting to see how bloated their corporations are and they're starting to kind of go the Elon route which is just the idea of well do we really need 6,000 people at Facebook working on the UI no I don't think that they do I don't think they do at all I don't think they need more than a couple dozen at most and that might even be over hiring that might even be bloated I think just a few guys can usually build great UI in ux experiments that's my opinion you know I've run lean startups so I kind of have at least a inkling of an idea what to do um but I can't speak for Facebook I don't know how many people they need I know it's not 6,000 though so I think a big part of the layoffs are are just they over hired to begin with if we look at Cloud fair right now this has been making big news just the last few days cloudfare is doing basically secret layoffs now no one has the full information on how many people they're letting go or anything but it appears as as though they're firing people at cause but there is no cause and they're not listing causes which is really it's just layoffs in Disguise because layoffs sound bad so they don't want their stock value to go down but they want to have their cake and eat it too they want to get rid of people to save money and I have seen from the videos I've watched of people talking about this and from the Articles I've read of people who are getting laid off it seems to me that they're getting rid of those hyp specialized jobs that they probably didn't need to begin with so I I think cloud fair is already you know kind of following in the footsteps of Elon and they're doing the same thing that everybody else is doing right now and I think it's sad and I think it's sad that they're disingenuous about it and not telling people the truth that's bad for employees and that's bad for the company ultimately because it really doesn't Inspire trust in the company employees don't want to go work for cloud fair if they know that they're kind of secretly behind the scenes firing people that they never should have hired to begin with that's just called bad management Unity said that they're firing something around 2,000 people maybe it was 1,800 or something around that it was about 25% of their Workforce now it's not doing it all in one day they're going to kind of spread it out over the next few months I think this is a really good example of a company that's having to lay people off for both reasons they have terrible management there's no debating that they tried to screw over every game developer everybody that used Unity everybody that worked with unity including myself I'm literally in the process of building a game in unity and then I go to my news app one day and find out Unity is going to charge for installs which is just outright blatantly the stupidest business move I've ever seen in any industry I think that ultimately that will kill Unity as a company so yeah I think with unity it goes Way Beyond um just they over hired but if you look at who they're firing they're not getting rid of their best programmers so yeah we're seeing of course companies are targeting the employees that don't matter so my advice guess to you if you are a programmer and you're watching this now and you're looking to get a job try to avoid getting a hypers specialized job to begin with make it so that you're somebody that can't be easily fired make it so that you're in a role that is at least some sort of General role that's not too hypers specialized so that you're valuable to the company and when push comes to shove and they have to get rid of people they're going to get rid of you last so here I have a list of companies that are doing layoffs as we speak and or going to do layoffs have announced they're going to do some and in the past year doing major layoffs and this is just a few of them this isn't all of them this is just the big ones we've got Amazon they've fired thousands of people already and they're planning thousands more same thing with IBM thousands of people have been fired and let go Dell rivan Microsoft Google is or alphabet is firing 30,000 people we've got Salesforce that uh fired 8,000 I think if I recall correctly meta Facebook 10,000 they're doing a bunch more too coinbase fired th like 1500 I think I could be wrong on that one um you've got Zoom fired tons of people Spotify Dropbox Yahoo epic games just fired 800 people again I looked at the charts of who they were firing I looked at uh personal opinions I looked at Twitter and it seemed to me like epic was firing almost entirely people they should have never hired to begin with uh Xerox twitch atlassian AMD Intel lift and Uber are firing thousands Highland software no Kia noia is firing 14,000 people in its Tech uh sector you've got LinkedIn firing thousands Qualcomm Oracle Shopify Groupon and there's like three or four dozen more big companies that I didn't even list almost all of them across the board were vastly over hiring and I mean vastly just thousands and thousands of more people than they needed they were employee farming that's all it is so so easy to look at this and think oh these companies are are firing people in anticipation for of just recession yeah that's probably a factor but yeah I think it goes way beyond that one other thing I want to talk about too is how awful Tech interviews have become now I want to make a totally separate video about this later um but because of this hyp specialization Tech interviews are just they're garbage now they're the most painful process to go through and they require so much unnecessary hyp specialized details when you're in interviewing I just hate it um so if you're out there and you're interviewing this is actually good news for you because we're going to start to see hiring practices massively shift instead of doing these hypers specialized rules all these companies are going to realize that it might actually be more profitable not to just follow the crowd of what people have done for the last 5 years 10 years but they're going to start hiring more generalists and people who wear more hats and have more value to the company so we're going to see a lot more useful Tech interviews you're going to go into a tech interview they're going to test you on the basics of the knowledge we're going to start seeing fizzbuzz probably make a comeback which will be really funny um and and we're just going to see more useful interviewing done probably by more useful people who are less hypers specialized themselves um so I think that's one good thing that will come out of this if you're a good programmer I think you will actually become more in demand and you will probably make more money too because as they weed out all the people that are too Specialized or maybe aren't General enough don't understand architecture well enough we're going to see the value proportion increase of individual programmers and we saw this happen in the reverse Direction the last kind of 20 30 years where programmers used to have super high wages proportionately to everything else and now today programmers make kind of much more similar money to a lot of bluecollar jobs I mean the average programming wage in America is between like 80 and $120,000 that's also what the average Journeyman Electrician makes now I mean things have really shifted to blueco color jobs being almost as valuable and that's probably just due to oversaturation in the industry so it'll be a good thing to see that kind of change and shift back to what it really should be thank you so much for watching this video I really do appreciate it I'm going to try to start getting more active on my channel again please like this video subscribe down below make sure you click the notification button because I'm going to be coming out with probably a new video every week thank you so much for watching again and see you later

Channel: Josh Christiane

Views: 389,109

Keywords: Tech, Layoffs, Fired, Fraud, Unity, Snapchat, Facebook, Cloudfare, Employee Farming, CEO, Leadership, Management, Technology, Programming, Jobs, Economy

Id: hAwtrJlBVJY

Length: 23min 50sec (1430 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 25 2024