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2016 Has Been an Ugly Year For Tech Layoffs, and It's Going To Get Worse, Says Analyst (ieee.org)
IEEE Spectrum writer Tekla Perry writes: Early this year, analyst Trip Chowdhry from Global Equities Research predicted that the tech world was going to see big layoffs in 2016 -- some 330,000 in all at major tech companies. At the time, these numbers seemed way over the top. Then IBM started slashing jobs in March -- and continued to wield the ax over and over as the year progressed. Yahoo began layoffs of some 15 percent of its employees in February. Intel announced in April that it would lay off 12,000 this year. So, was Chowdhry right? "Yes," he told me when I asked him this week. "The layoffs I predicted have been occurring." And worse, he says, these laid-off workers are never again going to find tech jobs: "They will always remain unemployed," at least in tech, he said. "Their skills will be obsolete." Some of these layoffs are due to a sea change in the industry, as it transforms to the world of mobile and cloud. But some are signs of a bubble about to pop. It's all going to get worse in 2017, he predicts, because that's when the tech bubble will burst. Chowdhry, someone who has never been reluctant to go out on a limb, is predicting that'll happen in March.
Traditional IT roles are getting automated out of existence - it's all devops and cloud these days. Great time to be working for a cloud provider, though. AWS and Azure are rocking, Oracle is trying desperately (and I hear they have to pay well to get anyone to come), Apple seems to be working on their own thing, rather than using Azure. Google is trying to make that business work for them.
Heck, lots of normal online businesses are hiring devs to make their stuff work in the cloud, so that's another path.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I wonder how many of these are actually cut positions versus outsourced replacements (H1Bs, etc)?
A lot of the IT spend was because new versions were better. Faster, more features, new shiny! Now people are waxing nostalgic for the older systems. Win7 is still king. And CPUs have been fast enough for a while. The only thing improving is drive speed as SSDs get larger and cheaper, but you can stick that in old kit and keep Win7! And who wants to drop a grand every 2 years on a phone that is not much better then the old one?
"They will always remain unemployed", referring to laid off tech workers, neglects to give most of them enough credit for being able to start their own businesses or to find a position at a smaller firm that needs their skills, probably for less money. But, to imply that they'll be obsolete is disingenuous.
The tech bubble has popped before, and it will pop again. That is just the natural respiration of our economy.
I am sure many of the laid-off workers can update their skillsets and find new jobs. Or some can go ahead and retire. The remaining ones can find accept a non-tech job at lower pay or unemployment.
And life will go on for everyone.
With a name like Trip Chowdhry, I guess layoffs and H1-B abuse have been bad in the equities research sector, as well. Upvote this post - please to doing the needful.
Hmm, from the fancy website, http://www.globalequitiesresea... I'm sure this guy and his team know what they are talking about. Especially when its regarding the Tech industry. :)
PT Barnum disagrees ...
Because the need for people in the field who can find out why Granny's printer isn't connecting and who can do a sideload on a TV streaming box is bigger than ever. This is a job that can't be outsourced away from you.
Yet 'we can not find anyone'
Most of the layoffs you are seeing are not material but cost cutting. Meaning the job just went to someone 10x cheaper. Companies will again learn 'you get what you pay for'.
From TFA, the one thing that is death to a tech career. >> “They will always remain unemployed,” at least in tech, he said. “Their skills will be obsolete.
Trump will save us, and he will make it paid for by fairies and pixie dust.
Well March isn't that much of a stretch or a limb. March is easily the most obviously likely time for a tech crash to happen. March 31st being the end of fiscal reporting period when companies, corporations, etc... all do their end of fiscal reporting. Seeing that bubble tend to last as long as possible to the last minute when they finally pop, that would put it firmly in March particularly if you have companies trying to save face for Q1.
As to 2017, who knows. I went into Computer Science and graduated just prior to the last bubble, which sucked.
That said this isn't exactly like last time. This time the layoffs are in big old gigantic corporations that have been around forever, were built up on one product, expended into everything, and have been collapsing under their own weight for a very long time now after failing to innovate and being surpassed by other more competitive companies. In most cases the layoffs are all part of restructuring deals as they spinoff and sell the undesirable departments to others hoping to pick the bones clean (and in some cases are just buying IP and assets, not working employees).
If there's a war on citizens wrt tech employment, then remove the means to exclude citizens.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
How much pixie dust will you give? And it's the Mexicans that will pay for it.
some of us have missed you
Those positions are boooooming!
Early this year, analyst Trip Chowdhry from Global Equities Research predicted that the tech world was going to see big layoffs in 2016 -- some 330,000 in all at major tech companies... So, was Chowdhry right? "Yes," he told me when I asked him this week. "The layoffs I predicted have been occurring."
I call bullshit on this guy. There's a table of predicted versus actual layoffs in the article. Of the 14 companies he made predictions about, only four of them seem to have any actual layoffs, and the actual numbers are generally a fraction of the predicted number. Layoffs for companies that he didn't even make predictions about are given, in an apparent effort to buff his credibility, but some of those companies are not exactly household names (WTF is "Zenefits"?), and as for the rest, their predicted layoffs are in the 5-to-10 percent range.
Not that further layoffs are necessarily unlikely, especially with this presidential election coming up. But it's already October, and it's been nowhere near as bad as this clown predicted. You don't get to say you were right when the data proves you wrong. You don't get credit for predicting layoffs in 2016 if they happen in 2017. You don't get to just make a blanket prediction like "layoffs will happen in the future" and get points when they eventually happen.
First off, the person who commented that it's "predictable when newer isn't better" is correct. Right now, I.T. technology is stagnant. IMO, that's not a bad thing either. What's happening is, just as many people are using computers and electronic devices as ever -- but the market has matured. There's a very low level of "techno lust" for the latest and greatest, because truthfully, what's already readily available is good enough for everything people want to do with their machines right now.
There's finally some sanity in corporate America, where technology is getting replaced on a schedule that reflects the time-frame it takes for the old gear to physically wear out, instead of demands for 2-3 year replacement cycles just because "the new thing is already old, since it can't run the cool new OS and new versions of apps X and Y".
And really, HP's situation is a different/unique one in the current round of layoffs. HP split their company into two, not long ago, realizing they had to jettison the "boat anchor" of printing/imaging so it didn't weigh down profits of the rest of the business. The HP doing all the layoffs now is the one holding the bag selling printers and scanners. They've also tried to acquire other printer manufacturers like Fujitsu, but ultimately, they're selling a product that's gone from a "must have" companion purchase with every new PC to a niche need. Their investment in 3D printing didn't appear to pan out either. (I think that's turned out to be a niche hobbyist interest, since it's still a very slow process to print a 3D object, the size of said object is really limited, AND it won't realize its full potential until there are much larger collections of downloadable projects to print. If all the major manufacturers of appliances offered a way to print repair parts on their "support" web sites, for example? Then you'd see 3D printing really take off.)
But claiming the people who get laid off have no future in I.T.? That's FUD, plain and simple. The trend to cloudify everything is still strong, but I've worked in the field long enough to say I'm confident it's going to trend back the other direction in the next decade or so. If you just look at the ridiculous number of data breaches in the news in the last year or two, you quickly see the problems with concentrating a large number of customer's data in one place. But hacking aside, the cloud services amount to giving up direct control over big chunks of your business operations. When one of these services has an outage, you can't do anything but sit around and hope they actually provide some status updates to pass along to your users and to management. Everyone's first question is "When will it be back up?" and you're stuck shrugging and saying, "Beats me! We're at the mercy of the provider." When this happens enough times, companies start demanding some more accountability and control. And you tend to get locked in to these services too. So if they raise prices or change pricing structures, you can't do much besides pay the new, higher bill (or go through a huge, unplanned project to migrate all the data elsewhere and retrain everyone on how to access it). I'm not sure how a cloud provider decides someone with many years of general I.T. experience, including such things as administering servers, troubleshooting networks and supporting staff wouldn't have skills applicable to working for their business anyway? But cloud is an overrated buzzword, either way.
good thing we learned after the Dot Bomb Crash 14-15 years ago.
In 2008, I was laid off after 8 years at a large company, and I'd been using the same tools for those 8 years. As a front-end developer for dev-ops shops, my skills were woefully out-of-date: We'd been using Sencha (JS) and Webware (PY), with some Python 2 Python-to-C libraries. I knew nothing about what the cool kids were doing. I sat down and in a few days taught myself Django and jQuery; I rebooted by SQL knowledge from my 90s-era experience with Oracle and taught myself the ins and outs of Postgresql.
And then, in the bottom of the recession, I took shit contracts that paid very little (in one mistake, nothing) but promised to teach me something. I worked for a Netflix clone startup; I traded my knowledge of video transcoding for the promise of learning AWS. I worked for a genetic engineering startup, trading my knowledge of C++ for the promise of learning Node, Backbone, SMS messaging, and credit card processing; a textbook startup, trading my knowledge of LaTeX for the promise of learning Java; an advertising startup trading my basic Django skills to learn modern unit testing; a security training startup, trading my knowledge of assembly language in order to learn Websockets.
The market improved. I never stopped learning. I gave speeches at Javascript and Python meet-ups. Recruiters sought me out.
I've been at another big company for four years now. Will things go to hell in March? I don't care. I have the one skill that matters.
My company laid off 5000 last year. The sole reason given was the rising cost of benefits. They then turned around and hired 3000 in India. If you like your healthcare....maybe you can keep your health care, but you don't get to keep your job.
Ok time to stop H1B's! as clearly they are not needed when USC's are being layed off.
Seriously, "never ever going to work in tech", give me a break.
The point of a college degree is to teach you how to learn, and to have basic skills in a field.
You don't get rid of MDs just because they aren't "up to the latest tech", they take a few CMEs and go do a slightly different version of being a doctor.
Same with Nurses.
Same with Biologists.
Same with Computer Scientists.
The problem is the employers being too lazy to train people, and using it as an excuse to outsource.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Just belittle the people you have screwed. Karma will pay it back to you and your ilk.
This is actually a cover up for the fact that American workers are being replaced by cheap foreign labor and H1Bs. All of these stupid millenial liberals who vote for Hillary because transgender bathrooms are cool need to get their head out of you know where, because NAFTA Hillary is totally bought off and paid for by the corporate and banking elite who want to vastly expand H1Bs and flood America with cheap foreign labor, and get us into every TPP bad trade deal, after all, Hillary hates the US and thinks you need to be taught a lesson for being a "racist" american by having your job stolen from you and your country stolen from you and given to invaders. Destroying the lives of millions of americans due to globalist policies is a high price to pay for transgender bathrooms to satisfy a bunch of know nothings with pierced noses and pink hair who think the US is the cause of every problem in the world, and that Cuba, China, and Iran, and the Islamic World are just so wonderful, and we have to commit suicide and kill ourselves off to prove we are good tolerant globalists who have a genocidal hatred of ourselves. Nice job destroying your own country, self hating traitorous tattoo covered retards, with your naive co-exist bumper stickers.
Did you ever consider what happens then ?
The elite has been screwing us and the debt millstone gets bigger by the day...
2016 Has Been an Ugly Year For Tech Layoffs? Good!
Keep laying off the ugly. This will only result in a better looking workforce!
The fact that someone sees a transformation to "mobile and the cloud" as a significant change in the skills required, makes me wonder just WTF skills these workers really had, even in their old jobs. Programming is programming.
It's true that sometimes a different environment has different constraints (e.g. I have more RAM on a phone than I have inside the Apache process on a much bigger server) but it's not really all that big a deal to adjust for, is it? So you're taking different approaches to caching -- you might have to unlearn some habits and learn some new ones (suddenly, CPU is expensive and RAM is cheap -- or vice versa).
How are skills being obsoleted? I don't get it. The more tech advances I see, the more I'm convinced that hardly anything is ever really changing much at all.
I am sure many of the laid-off workers can update their skillsets and find new jobs.
How does one update their skill sets?
See, I've been there.
Classes mean nothing. You must have on the job experience.
Employment in this industry is a catch-22. You have to have a job to get the "skills" and in order to get the skills you have to have on the job experience. Having code on GitHub to show off what you learned on your own means nothing: no one even looks.
And then there is the other myth: those laid off have out of date skills. Nothing could be further from the truth. They were laid off because a cheaper solution or labor was found.
And there's this pervasive attitude/myth/delusion that those unemployed and can't get work "don't have the skills". I guess it allows those with jobs to sleep at night, but the fact is, these people getting laid off do in fact have up to date skills. And let's for the sake of argument say they don't by some crazy reason, is anyone going to argue that things have changed so much that current employees cannot get up to speed?
And the unfortunate thing is with the attitude of folks regarding unemployed people is that is makes them damaged goods.
Sorry my fellow AC, but when you become unemployed for any reason in this profession, you become unemployable.
IBM is not a good example as IBM has been imploding for years, with layoffs every year. See Robert X Cringely for details.
probably isn't related to this in any way, shape or form -- right?
Hallowed be Her name.
Hello? You seem to be all on denial. Jobs will be replaced by other jobs, but the point is *they will always be less*.
More and more of our tasks will be automated. Bigger and bigger clouds means less people to keep them running. More standardized stuff. Weavers replaced by carpenters and blacksmiths to keep the spinning Jennies running, but less of them. Carpenters and blacksmiths replaced by factory workers churning out standardized weaving machines.
The same is happening to us right now. We're watching an Industrial Revolution Reloaded. Only that things are happening way faster now.
If you don't believe me, look at the uprising of populist parties all over the place. We had that already once. But there was an escape hatch back then, I don't see any now.
Confidante.....not cosmonaut.....
Tech has been overdue for labor representation for decades now. What, did you fall asleep when they told you that the FLSA didn't apply to you?
Mexican fairies, and lots, yuge amounts!
I am indispensable because everyone wants my talents and it's all about me.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
And more importantly take market positions acting on that, so that he can advise his clients to cash out. I mean let's look here: Who the fuck is "Global Equities Research "? Nobody I've every heard of, they aren't some major national or international investment firm. So you go look at their site and it is light on the information (very light) heavy on the marketing fluff. Basically, they advise their clients on what is going on with relation to trends that would be useful in making stock picks.
Right, so for that to be profitable you have to:
1) Have good information that a company can use to make stock picks.
2) Only give it to customers.
#2 is really important. For one, if you give it out to everyone, well then why should someone pay you anything? Like I'm not going to go and pay for the U1-U6 numbers since BLS gives them to everyone for free. They have to be offering something you can't have for nothing. However the other thing is that if everyone in the market knows something, you can't really capitalize on it. If I was able to say with 100% certainty that a bank will default next year, and prove it to everyone's satisfaction, well then the only people who would make anything would be the people who could act the quickest. Everyone would dump their stock and bonds, get their money out, etc and I'd actually be proven wrong by my own prediction since it would cause it to happen early. However if I held that information close and only shared it with some people, we could make money. We could get our assets out for a good price, take out options, etc since we had information others didn't.
Thus this guy is either a dipstick, or is deliberately spreading information that he WANTS to be true, rather than information that is (or both). He's advised clients to take different positions, and he needs people to take positions as though this was true to make them money.
Also, it looks like this isn't the first time he's said some really wrong shit: http://fortune.com/2013/07/07/... is an article where he's saying Apple is done in 2012 and also saying no money would change hands between Samsung and Apple (Samsung just lost their appeal and will have to pay).
As someone I know who works for a "cloud" provider says "There is no cloud, there's just someone else's computer." So really, what are you outsourcing when you go to "the cloud"? Your servers, and associated infrastructure and personnel. Ok, great. However that's only a small part of IT needs. You still need computers and network on site to access that shit in the cloud, it isn't magic, there has to be something to get at it and you need people to support that. You can outsource that too, of course, but that doesn't quite scale in the same way datacenter outsourcing does. Then of course you need people to support your users. "The cloud" doesn't magically make your users well trained and able to use all your software with no issues, and not fuck up their computers. No, they'll still need the same amount of hand holding as before at a minimum, and probably more because now there's another layer in the mix. Likewise if you have anything custom that you need developed or maintained, you still need that done. Your "cloud" provider isn't going to provide you with free web design, free DB analytics, free custom software, you are going to pay someone to do it for you.
Oh and a lot of the more economical cloud solutions? Ya they don't admin the VMs for you. They run the physical infrastructure, but all they give you is access to a system, maybe throw up an OS at your request (which you pay licensing/support for if applicable). They don't patch it, don't update it, etc. That's all on you. So you have to have someone to do that as well, or go with a much more expensive managed solution.
So even if all companies did outsource 100% of their server infrastructure to companies like Amazon, and even if those companies didn't have to hire more staff to support all that (which they would), it still wouldn't equal a massive reduction in IT needs because you've only moved a small part of the equation off premises. So unless you are talking about people who know ONLY how to setup and maintain physical servers and that's all they can do or will do, then no they aren't going to be out of work forever.
Trump will save us, perhaps even from you. If you are a H1B-cunt, please know I hate your guts. You are taking a job away from a deserving person. Why don't you stay in India and develop The Next GREATEST App there? How about a cow-spotting app?
Juast change your name to habeeb
I watched convergys iT admin from the Philippines log in remotely to my computer today to update firefox. he ran a meaningless command in the Run prompt and then emailed us telling me the issue was not fixable. Our local it guy who technically is only paid to plug in the computers fixed it in 5 minutes. US will keep outsourcing and wondering why shit does not work. Its because they higher people from these counties and the only skill they have is shitting in a hole in the ground.
this a milling fucking times over
what does SME stand for?
I work for a similar company that does the same thing. The people who make the decisions to outsource don't know tech and assume, ignorantly, that they are of the same quality.
The clients I go to see to fix their network tell me they cannot understand a word the call center says and whenever they ask a question they just say yes rather than ask them to repeat themselves 2 or 3 times.
Too much common sense expected of politicians. They are on the take for foreign countries and support the H1-B indentured servant/replace U.S. worker program.
Trump will upset them, overturn the apple cart.
I think that part of the problem is the constant demand to satisfy shareholders.
If a company's profits aren't continually going up - despite the fact that there are no cash flow issues and it can afford it's employee's salaries and other expenses, there is still a huge push to "get the numbers up".
One way to do this is downsizing - laying off "non-essential or non-critical" staff in an effort to boost profits and satisfy shareholders.
It's always about the shareholders in large publicly traded companies - not the employees or the customers.
And the irony is that the majority of shareholders are not people who really need the money. At least not as much as the workers who need the jobs.
I'm tired of all the IT outsourcing overseas. When I was employed at Citizens Bank and asked to train IBM Global - India, I put it off as long as I can. I refused. Any calls I made to the bridge regarding training I did not train. I discussed random topics not applicable to the work. I made sure they knew I did not understand a word they said. I was kept on board because I was leading a high profile project and I was the only one that configured and implemented it. When the project was done I was asked to train IBM Global... again I just put it off, ignored it. When the project was done, my employment there was over. I collected unemployment for a little while I put together a plan to find a role that would not get outsourced overseas. Eventually I did find something with a Defense Contractor. My role will never be outsourced overseas and a Secret Clearance is good for 10 years. If the contractor looses the contract there is a very good chance that I'll be picked up by the winning contractor because talented engineers with a Secret clearance are needed and it costs money to apply for a new security clearance. Identity Theft is rampant in the US. I am pretty confident it's due to outsourcing IT Infrastructure jobs overseas.
I wouldn't hire any of you racist fucks. Go to hell.
I did not say any of the things you suggested.
I attempted to dumb things down a great deal so please read it and take it as written instead of adding detail between the lines that is not there.
IT Workers are too independently-minded to form a union! Such blue-collar collectivism is far beneath them.
They don't seem to mind working for free, though. Apparently, they're not that independently-minded.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
"The people who make the decisions to outsource don't know technology..."
Exactly. They make stupid decisions. Today's Dilbert cartoon is relevant.