https://www.economist.com/business/2023/03/27/where-have-all-the-laid-off-tech-workers-gone https://archive.is/UopZ0 Between the depths of the pandemic in the spring of 2020 and peak employment at the start of 2023, the tech sector added around 1m workers. Simply enlisting such numbers required hiring plenty of recruiters; as a headhunting rule of thumb, one recruiter can hire 25 new employees a year. Many of those same recruiters may now be surplus to requirements. For years unsexy industries like industrial goods have struggled to compete with the tech industry for talent. Now they are pouncing. John Deere, an American tractor-maker, has been snapping up fired tech workers to help it make smarter farm machinery. Last year the firm opened an office in Austin, a thriving tech hub in Texas. Carmakers, increasingly focused on software, are also hungry for technologists. So are banks, health insurers and retailers. Some of the laid-off techies are helping fuel a new generation of startups. Applications in January to y Combinator, a startup school in Silicon Valley, were up five-fold on the previous year.
Or drawing down their savings while skiing all season 😅
As expected. Plenty of great places to work that aren't tech companies. The conventional wisdom has been outdated for a while.
Oh please. Plenty of people would be open to working for these companies if they paid better. I have never understood how this narrative misses that.
I thought that’s already understood
Alternative title: Low paying shark companies pray on desperate engineers during downturn.
There’s no actual numbers for how many tech workers these non-tech equipment companies actually plan to hire, but I don’t think it could possibly be enough. For example Amazon alone is laying off 27000 people and we haven’t even started talking about the layoffs at Microsoft, Google, Meta and hundreds of other tech companies. I think hundreds of thousands of workers have been laid off by tech companies in just the past 6-12 months. There’s very few tech companies doing large scale hiring. Can Ford, John Deere or some banks really absorb that many tech workers? I think in practice a lot of tech workers are going to be out of work or leaving the country or doing some temporary gigs/contract work or even other completely different line of work until the tech sector rebounds.
So this is a good thing. People are moving toward building useful things
Yep, all those tech folks in traditional industries get to make DRM for farm and car stuff and further anti-right to repair stuff, definitely useful work. There is cool work happening in these industries but they suck a lot, too. They are no better than tech companies nor are they more “useful,” but you get paid less to boot!
These people were hiring before but had a harder time because other employers were offering a better wage. Now there are fewer options so they’re taking the worse wage. Maybe good for someone but not for any of us lol.