Not a day goes by without a tech company announcing major job cuts. Today Paypal and Block (both payment service providers) have announced a total of 3500 job cuts, and recently Salesforce, Microsoft, SAP, Google, Ebay etc. have also done so. According to
https://layoffs.fyi, 25,000 documented tech jobs have already been cut this year.
What do you think? Is it just a shrinkage and normalization after the strong build-up of the workforce during Corona or a long-term trend that will accelerate through the use of AI?
To be honest, it's pretty expected from the massive expansion that we saw during COVID. People were hired left and right, Computer Science graduates were getting paid ridiculous sign-on bonuses, and employees were pushing for WFH hard.
The unwinding of the low interest rate environment is what has caused these layoffs for the past 2 years. This year is just a continuation.
I don't anticipate it to be sustained much further though, given that rates are starting to come off again and central banks around the world will probably be more dovish following lower inflation reports. It sucks to be involved in one, that's for sure.