From my experience in some large tech firms, you could easily cut 20% of the workers and not see much impact. There is so much bloat, process-people, meetings-people, etc... Even if the cuts aren't from AI, execs will use AI as a reason to make these cuts.
2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March
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Re: 2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March
#102AI as a real impact or more as an excuse?
The "real impact" of AI being gargantuan spending, or something else?
Re: 2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surprised it took this long. I feel bad for the employees, but I can’t remember the last success they had. Metaverse, VR, throwing absurd money at AI and for what?
Their last success was acquiring Instagram in 2012. Every new effort since then has been hemorrhaging money. They get away with it because they have two limitless money faucets in Facebook and Instagram, but their product strategy as a whole has been a disaster.
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Re: 2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their last success was acquiring Instagram in 2012. Every new effort since then has been hemorrhaging money. They get away with it because they have two limitless money faucets in Facebook and Instagram, but their product strategy as a whole has been a disaster.
It would be incredible to think that Mark Zuckerberg genuinely thought their Metaverse/VR investment was going to be akin to Xerox's bayarea PARC campus (developer of modern networking / GUI &c). I guess both were ultimately profit-negative financial disasters.
It's easy to get caught up in your own hype when you're surrounded entirely by people who always tell you what you want to hear.
Re: 2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March
#105The money tree is over. Companies now have to pick between gpus and employees. They picked gpus.
Lots of different companies argue with the AI for some time before they call me, but they always call me.
They'll never be able to explain what they want to the AI, and even if they could, it couldn't solve the problem anyway.
Nevertheless I'm not going to be contracting much longer, I'm writing software by hand to compete with the garbage shat out of Claude's VibeCloaca. I already have customers, I just need to ... tune a few things before I scale, so that I don't have any customer support problems at scale. :)
Re: 2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was laid off from Atlassian this/last week. Since then I've been playing Satisfactory for 12 hours a day. Crazy thing is, I delivered optimizations that saved 1m USD over the last 12 months, with another optimization in-flight that would save another 1m USD. I thought that was enough to protect me from layoffs/PIPs - I guess no one was counting. AI is just an excuse for layoffs which IMO CEOs are trying to use to r…
It's a fools errand to ever believe in job security. Even if you're absolutely right on your importance, management can always remain stupid longer than you can remain employed.
It truly feels like a farce. I've survived a few rounds of layoffs and I've seen both shitty engineers and our best engineers let go. I assume our good ones are too expensive? It seems like HR just does some spreadsheet magic to grab people without any regard for performance or title.
Re: 2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March
#107AI as a real impact or more as an excuse?
It's probably a mix of AI productivity boost and market cycle. There is some substance to AI job loss, but I believe jevons paradox will eventually catch up to transformer-based LLM capabilities. I'm the last remaining frontend developer after multiple rounds of layoffs. With claude code I'm able to do 2x-3x the work I was able to do before it existed. It's hard for me to rationally argue we need more frontend develo…
> It's hard for me to rationally argue we need more frontend developers.
What about when you need a day off, or when you quit unexpected?
Re: 2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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FDR essentially pioneered the modern use of the omnibus bill by threatening to veto any assistance to the poor/elderly that didn't include social security. Basically his goal was to make the poor starve if social security didn't pass, and blackmail politicians into being forced to vote for it. Of course this was all predicated on the other prong, which was the 'switch in time that saved 9' where he also threatened to…
FDR also bullied Congress into passing laws and threatened their individual reelections using his cult of personality the same way Trump has been doing for a decade now to keep the moderates and fiscal conservatives in his party from making any noise.
Re: 2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March
#109META rumoured to be purging by Tuesday.
Calls locked in.
Re: 2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March
#110The money tree is over. Companies now have to pick between gpus and employees. They picked gpus.
They picked the enshittification generators over paying people to enshittify by hand.
Well, maybe they can spin up some fake users with all those GPUs to use their shitty site.
(Oh, heh. I just remembered that they actually did that: https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/10/meta-acquired-moltbook-the...)