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Tech Jobs Took a Big Hit Last Year (fortune.com)
Barb Darrow, writing for Fortune: Tech jobs took it on the chin last year. Layoffs at computer, electronics, and telecommunications companies were up 21 percent to 96,017 jobs cut in 2016, compared to 79,315 the prior year. Tech layoffs accounted for 18 percent of the total 526,915 U.S. job cuts announced in 2016, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a global outplacement firm based in Chicago. Of the 2016 total, some 66,821 of the layoffs came from computer companies, up 7% year over year. Challenger attributed much of that increase to cuts made by Dell Technologies, the entity formed by the $63 billion convergence of Dell and EMC. In preparation for that combination, layoffs were instituted across EMC and its constituent companies, including VMware.
We're overdue for a recession. However, I don't think Wall Street got the memo yet. Bonds are oversold as everyone and their mother jumped into the stock market. When the bandwagon drives past you, that's when you make a U-turn in the market. I've been buying up oversold bond funds since the election. Looking forward to buying stock shares on the way down after the market crashes.
The problem is that since the 1990s, everyone feels the crash. Only a few see the recovery. When the economy tanked in 2000, for a lot of the US, it stayed tanked because the manufacturing jobs and steel mills went overseas. In 2008 when we had the economy crash, tech sector jobs have improved, but in reality, for most other sectors, there has not been that much, if any improvement. If other sectors see it, it is spillover from the tech sector (new BMWs, housing going up), or from other countries buying up land in the US.
I would say the economy peaked last summer, when in June and early July, there were hundreds of DevOps job postings for the local area I am in (Austin, TX). In six weeks, the number of those was reduced by over 90%.
We do have a few bubbles that may pop. First, the only thing that VCs are spending a dime on are companies that either push ads, suck data (analytics), or both. Even cloud computing hit a zenith in the past year where HP left the cloud market, and Rackspace got bought out. The uncertainty about the elections has also shaken people, and that might just have been enough to start an economic slide. To boot, OPEC is back with a vengence, and oil is climbing, which is also a drag on the economy.
Then, there is the final nail in the coffin. The Fed waiting to raise interest rates.
I'm seeing an across the board belt tightening. Public places have hiring freezes. Private companies are looking at technologies like Amazon Lambda [1], serverless technologies, and wholesale, "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" moves to AWS. AWS may be more expensive, but in a lot of PHB's heads, even if it costs more, reducing headcount is more important, because of the immediate cost savings.
I think as uncertainty goes on and it goes to outright unrest, the economy is going to not fare well. Especially with so many people disliking the current administration and are willing to monkeywrench to see that it doesn't do well.
[1]: The main attraction for Amazon Lambda is that companies can fire their OS, DBAs, and hardware guys, and just have someone doing IAM as the "IT department" with devs doing everything else.