Layoff are not because of economic conditions. Big Tech has enough cash, assets and credit to weather many storms. And many didn’t see their revenues hit that much while others saw their revenues actually increase. It would be such a stupid move to hire like crazy, pay ridiculous TC just to fire people 2 years after to increase the bottom line. What they didn’t see coming was a pandemic that would give them the opportunity to send everyone home and establish a remote working model that would allow them to hire anywhere in the world. The pandemic was the perfect excuse, if they tried to switch to a remote model during normal times, it would have been suspicious and they would’ve found resistance and media backlash. So now that this model is established, why would they keep hiring people in the US? If you are the CEO, with WFH system in place, why would you pay 3-4x for something? So yeah, they scaled up their headcount around the world and now it’s time to scale down in the US. This is my opinion, I hope to be wrong and they increase the US headcount and pay 400k for mid level again. Edit: TC 250k
Given that most of those companies are requiring multiple days in-office, this seems not to be the case.
Requiring hybrid work weeks is the counterpoint to OP's argument.
Companies were always able (even pre pandemic) to hire lower wage talent in other countries.
OP, you are partially correct about the move to a global workforce plus the recession also gives cover for companies to move out lower performers and more expensive employees.
In a capitalist and meritocratic society what’s wrong with that? If a low wage employee can do the job of a high TC employee isn’t it great for our capitalism?
@Intel, "our capitalism"? Holy crap! I hope it's post-irony.
Nope, disagree. They all are calling for RTO already. Appearently the outcome will be some days work at home is now normalized. Small companies who compete for talent for big ones though may continue to hire all remote. Off shoring has been available and done for decades, it is nothing new, and pros and cons are well established. If anything companies are onshoring their people and operations. Any company hiring anywhere in the world is a pipe dream.
They tried this before and it turns out code written in India, China, and Europe are all lower quality. Hiring Australians gets you the Australian government coercing the employee to write backdoors for them. With Europe it's not even cheaper.
Actually our India team is much better and more productive than the people we hire in NYC
Do you have data for “lower quality”? Tech was nowhere in these countries 15 years ago, but now a lot of improvements have been made. I could only find this sourced from HackerRank https://www.sayonetech.com/blog/which-country-has-best-computer-programmers-and-developers/
High interest rates = higher discount rate when calculating NPV for projects = many projects cancelled = layoffs
Agreed that Bay area devs are in for a shock when they realize who they're competing with now. Also Dev salaries got way too high, like 2 year experienced mid programmers earning more than experienced surgeons isn't going to last long.
SWE: “we get paid for our unique skills” Also SWE getting paid $400k, “If I disable autocorrect in chat, would it increase my user engagement? BAM! We the best people”
You're wrong.
Isnt there a trend of big company hiring in India? India headcount grew this past two years
From all I read there has been lots of layoff in India as well, notable at Amazon.