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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.
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).
I was out of work for two years (2009-10), told I was unemployable by recruiters, and got a full-time IT support job in 2011. As far as job skills were concerned, nothing changed during those two years.
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.
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.
In other countries you get health care AND jobs. What are you guys doing wrong?