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Tech Layoffs More Than Double In Bay Area (mercurynews.com)
An anonymous reader shares an article on Mercury News: In yet another sign of a slowdown in the booming Bay Area economy, tech layoffs more than doubled in the first four months of this year compared to the same period last year (could be paywalled, here's an alternate source). Yahoo's 279 workers let go this year contributed to the 3,135 tech jobs lost in the four-county region of Santa Clara, San Mateo, Alameda and San Francisco counties from January through April, as did the 50 workers axed at Toshiba America in Livermore and the 71 at Autodesk in San Francisco. In the first four months of last year, just 1,515 Bay Area tech workers were laid off, according to mandatory filings under California's WARN Act. For that period in 2014, the region's tech layoffs numbered 1,330. The jump comes amid a litany of other signs that the tech economy may be taking a breather: disappointing earning reports from stalwarts like Apple, an IPO market that has come to a near standstill, a volatile stock exchange and uncertainty in China.
Number H1B requests to go up as well.
Just looking at layoffs only shows half the equation. How many jobs were added during the same period?
From TFA:
"Today the Bay Area's total employment of 3,353,600 as of the end of March still reflects job growth, with102,600 workers added from March 2015 through March 2016."
The Bay Area's skyrocketing tech layoffs reflect a transformation in the sector, said Stephen Levy, director of the Palo Alto-based Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy.
"We are being increasingly driven by the growth of the large companies," Levy said. "What you did not see on the list is layoffs from Apple or Google or Facebook or LinkedIn ... which are all expanding. This is the era of the large companies."
In short, it's not all doom-and-gloom in the Valley.
I had a manager who thought of himself as the next Jack Welch, implemented a bottom 10% firing policy, and drove out the top 10% out of the company. I was the third out of a dozen senior lead testers who responded to the manager's "his way or the highway" speech by submitting my resignation. He drove the company all the way into bankruptcy. Not surprisingly, he blamed other people for that disaster.
From the article:
"Today the Bay Area's total employment of 3,353,600 as of the end of March still reflects job growth, with102,600 workers added from March 2015 through March 2016."
In other words, the tech job market is healthy as ever, which includes a natural migration of jobs away from unproductive and unsuccessful companies to those which are better managed.
You mean like working for Microsoft?
Oh, by the way, China does not have economic problems at all compared to the USA compared to what is being 'reported'. China'd only problem is subsidising USA consumption and creating its own inflation for that purpose. USD collapsed will fix that.
Yeah, you're right. Billions spent constructing whole cities that sit empty, large drops in the stock market (to the point where trading has to be halted on multiple occasions), houses and apartments sitting empty because they were purchased as investments and have driven up the cost of rent/real estate, and significant drops in demand for raw materials such as steel or other goods such as construction materials aren't major economic problems.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
This Internet bubble has lasted a little longer than the last one, and there isn't any one thing you can point to that's absolutely ridiculous this time (pets.com sock puppet, theglobe.com IPO, etc.) But, the VC money has been drying up again, and this forces startups to get rid of staff. There was an article a couple of days ago on Slashdot about Dropbox cutting some of the crazy perks they've been giving out to attract "the best and the brightest" like free meals and laundry.
This is the natural cycle of things, even in big companies. Some places I've worked for routinely over-hire or have staff doing jobs that don't really need to be done during the good times. When things turn bad, bloodbath city. Look at HP cutting 30,000 employees lately - i guarantee that was them finally digesting the last of EDS and dumping the random redundant assistant account liaison executives, etc. The place I currently work for is majority-owned by Europeans, so the opposite is true. You have to prove completely the demonstrated need for a new position, partially because it's harder to just dump people on the street in Europe than it is here. As a result, there are layoffs but they're much smaller and require a bigger downturn than most medium-ish companies would to start hauling out the axe. Length of service around here is pretty long as a result, because people are doing more work than the average IT person stuck in a very narrow silo of activity.
It will be interesting to see what happens, especially in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. I would never move there because of housing costs (and this is coming from a New Yorker...) I can definitely see bigger companies with deeper pockets scooping up the actual smart people, and a huge unemployment nightmare for the hangers-on. Remember how many paper MCSEs and HTML "programmers" there were out of work in 2001!
Jack Welch only did this for management staff. I think most people who have had to deal with idiot managers stuck at the level of their incompetence (the Peter Principle) and clogging up the system for everyone under them, won't find this such a terrible idea. However, it also only really worked for GE because it was an exceptional company, so the bottom 10% of managers there were still in the upper levels of management experience/ability in general. I have heard (from someone who used a recruiter who worked with Welch) that they didn't even need to fire the bottom managers. They just passed their details along to the headhunters circling the company and those people had a new job within a week.
It sounds like your manager was like those little Steve Jobs' that populate the tech industry and believe they can have world class design on third world budgets.
Why hypocrites? A shortage of talent AND layoffs can actually coexist within the same company. If you need Linux Developers and you've just dropped your unsuccessful Mac or Windows product and laid off the entire devision, how does that suddenly add to the pool of Linux Developers? The folks being laid off are picked over for talent worth retaining in light of current company needs. The ones whose jobs are eliminated but are not sufficiently skilled to be deployed elsewhere within the company are let go.
My questions are:
* Should companies continue to make products no one wants in order to avoid layoffs?
* Should they retain employees who used to support Windows but cannot support Linux (or vice versa) and call them Talented on the new platform?
Thanks,
- Wiz
The rate of crime has steadily decreased over the last twenty five years, while unemployment has had its ups and major downs. You couldn't be more wrong.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Why hypocrites?
A shortage of talent AND layoffs can actually coexist within the same company.
If you need Linux Developers and you've just dropped your unsuccessful Mac or Windows product and laid off the entire devision, how does that suddenly add to the pool of Linux Developers?
The folks being laid off are picked over for talent worth retaining in light of current company needs. The ones whose jobs are eliminated but are not sufficiently skilled to be deployed elsewhere within the company are let go.
My questions are:
* Should companies continue to make products no one wants in order to avoid layoffs?
* Should they retain employees who used to support Windows but cannot support Linux (or vice versa) and call them Talented on the new platform?
Thanks,
- Wiz
Answer: The employer should offer retraining to the affected employees so they can transition from software development for Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS X, to use your example, to GNU/Linux. Some employees will refuse retraining and prefer to be laid-off - fine. However, I dare say many of the existing software developers will opt for retraining. The fundamental skills remain the same although the operating system specific aspects should be the focus of the transition.
You've worked at a company where they actually move people instead of doing a dump and hire? Can you hear me all the way back in the 1950s?
California as a state imposes way to many taxes and regulations on business. If you decided you were going to try and start a business in California you might as well just flush your money down the toilet instead.
I left California for Oregon in '95, since it was apparent even back then which direction it was headed. There is a very good reason why even California businesses are moving employees out of California, and your analysis of the problems is spot on.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.