These layoffs are blips relative to total crew added in past couple years. Don’t think it will significantly affect anything.
It’s not like all of these tech people are in these areas. Quite a bit of remote work
When Salesforce laid off 8,000 employees earlier this year, folks that came from the Tableau and Slack acquisitions were impacted.
$27.7B was spent to acquire Slack. While $15.7B was spent to acquire Tableau.
Source: The 10 Biggest Salesforce Acquisitions | Salesforce Ben
Absolutely
SF has a different vision for how the business can run and is eliminating roles because of it. It’s not all performance based.
I just felt the initial comment I replied to was insensitive because there are so many good people/high performers who have experienced layoffs recently and I feel for them.
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My direct experience has been otherwise. Generally, it doesn’t really make sense to shut down profitable products. But, I will try to be more sensitive in the future.
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Are you really serious? Not sure where you’ve been these past few months, but when Twitter cut its staff by half (3750 folks), there were reports that they had to ask some of the crucial staff to come back. Lots of stories about it on LinkedIn.
And if you think 50k tech layoffs less than one month into 2023 is just a blip, then I have nothing else to say to you.
I’ve been in Tech for 15+ years and I have been through acquisitions, reduction in force (rif), and re-orgs. It is never fun when you are the one being laid off.
Companies like Amazon fire low performers every year even when the economy is great. They also hire great candidates even if there is no real need, so there’s a ton of fat to be trimmed.
Not sure if it’s true, but I heard that Google went after higher paid great performers in the layoffs that were announced last week.
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It’s stressful just knowing that it’s happening even if you don’t get laid off. I think what he meant to say is that 18K people is nothing compared to the total number of Amazon employees.
Ok and what percentage of the workforce do these cuts represent? Far far less than 50%
@Bostoncarconcierge - I was hoping you could shed some light on this topic, given your expertise working with various dealerships and customers. Based on OP’s post, these two questions came to mind:
- Do you expect a slow down in business given the current economic climate?
- Should we expect some of your dealers (BMW, Audi, and Volvo) to offer more favorable deals in the coming months?
50k in tech cuts in total from all these companies is 3% of amazons work force. Let’s stop with the histrionics. Cuts could definitely increase and become worse, obviously it sucks for those employees. On the grand scheme these are still rounding errors and statistically insignificant.
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I think you are missing the point. We can agree to disagree on this.
If Amazon cuts 10 % of staff I agree that will have a large impact. I just think we are far below.
Another thing with these tech layoffs is the severance is generally pretty good so you have a few months of insulation from these things really affecting people.
Not always. Also don’t forget that some states offer minimal unemployment benefits. Back in April 2020, I was laid off from a startup with about 150 employees. 20% of roles were cut. We were informed via Zoom. I recall the separation package looking something like this:
- Our insurance benefits remained active until the end of the month, about 3 weeks after the initial announcement.
- I was given 1 month of severance, since I was only at the company for less than a year (11 months).
- Career placement assistance was made available, I believe.
My VP personally called me that day. He offered to connect me with anyone in his professional network. He did weekly check-ins with me. In the mean time, I applied for unemployment insurance. MA is one of the top 5 states for benefits. One month later, I was able to land a new job.
EDIT: Any unvested stock option is lost when an employee is no longer employed by the issuing company.
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To keep somewhat on topic, at least in NorCal which is where I live, not sure if there are that many immediate openings to absorb all of these folks that are laid off, the compensation will of course be less than the boon years. Also I’m not sure even psychologically a newly laid off person that found a new job will immediately go out and grab that X7. Layoffs often times are about who you’re friends with, and it may not be about performance. If you are a 10x coder, wait a little bit and grab that M3, there will be deals IMO.
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To be honest, the affected employees are mostly entry-level or next-to-entry-level.
The ones who can truly afford luxury cars are not impacted, and may even benefit from the rising stock price (because the big companies cut cost).
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Doubt the layoffs are going to change much in Seattle. Barely any dealers here discounted much pre COVID anyway
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Maybe where you work (Amzn?) I would not project that to every tech company. I see some “open to work” people in my LinkedIn connections that are quite senior.
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Yep, tons of senior people on LinkedIn in the last 6 months posting about how they were let go. I know many people personally that have lost their jobs in this round that were senior and outstanding performers.
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Do you have data to support this statement at the macro level?
Ligma and Johnson didn’t seem to be very high up on the ladder.
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