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2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March

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Re: 2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March

#91

Post by mothballed »

doomslayer999 wrote: post #76
logicchains wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the boomers' fault, they were misled into believing the social security system they were paying into was a genuine savings system, not just a perpetual wealth transfer system from the young to the old.

[flagged]

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 pack the courts to ensure it was found 'constitutional'. FDR was quite ruthless in his destruction of constitutional and democratic controls, and now so much of our government depends on it that it's effectively politically impossible to unwind.

Re: 2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March

#92

Post by mothballed »

avidiax wrote: post #63
logicchains wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the boomers' fault, they were misled into believing the social security system they were paying into was a genuine savings system, not just a perpetual wealth transfer system from the young to the old.

How were they mislead? From day one, Social Security was a "new money pays old money" scheme, the one thing that makes it Ponzi-like. To be fair, the boomers got screwed in the 1980's SS reform to pay for their parents (but had it sweet before), so maybe this is just paying it forward.

It was specifically sold as 'insurance' to the public around the time it was being passed.

Well except for a short period where that was going to be deliberated on by the courts, where they stopped calling it insurance since SCOTUS indicated this insurance wouldn't be constitutional, so instead they put it under general welfare clause but then changed up their rhetoric immediately after it was found constitutional back to it being insurance again.

Also the people that wrote the bill later admitted they intentionally wrote it in a confusing as way to evade public and judicial scrutiny.

Re: 2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March

#93

Post by danny_codes »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #69
paxys wrote: post #43

Earlier 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.

Meta ad spend increases 10% every year. Their products have had non stop continual successes for decades at this point. If fb and insta never changed and were solely relying on tailwind you could say they havent had any success, but this clearly is not true imo. Their family of apps have changed a lot, mostly for the worse imo, but it has led to massive increases in ad shows and spend per ad show.

They’ve gotten better at addiction-engineering. Like making super-cocaine, it’s not a good thing. Essentially they took a dubiously ethical business and ramped it into, “actively harmful to almost everyone”. Any reasonable country would ban half the ads that make it onto FB/Insta. FB themselves admit 10% of their ad traffic is literal scammers.

Re: 2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March

#94

Post by ashleyn »

apatheticonion wrote: post #59
tayo42 wrote: post #39

Unemployed people, what are you doing?

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.

Re: 2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March

#95

Post by stefan_ »

dd8601fn wrote: post #70
coffeefirst wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of this smells purely nihilistic. The market rewarded layoffs with higher stock prices, incentivizing more layoffs.

It sure didn't reward Atlassian. If anything it accelerated the long, downward slide.

Atlassian hasn't made money in 10 years. Of course they can't ride on the latest stock slop meme, that company is such an unmitigated disaster it beats even their terrible software. And now they keep spamming me with that Rovo garbage, god I hope they go down among all of this.

Re: 2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March

#96

Post by dasil003 »

jordanb wrote: post #65
ProllyInfamous wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Watching their demo video was the perfect encapsulation of "this was not made for users" I have ever seen. First of all the idea of hanging out in a digital world with Mark Zuckerberg is so bleak. I can't imagine a worse hang. But other than that, it was all about working in a digital office, being advertised to, etc. They had this scene where one of Zuck's definitely-real friends is excited about "this new street ar…

In other words they haven't really pushed the vision forward since the Jaws 19 hologram in Back To The Future 2.

Re: 2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March

#97

Post by HDThoreaun »

danny_codes wrote: post #93
HDThoreaun wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta ad spend increases 10% every year. Their products have had non stop continual successes for decades at this point. If fb and insta never changed and were solely relying on tailwind you could say they havent had any success, but this clearly is not true imo. Their family of apps have changed a lot, mostly for the worse imo, but it has led to massive increases in ad shows and spend per ad show.

They’ve gotten better at addiction-engineering. Like making super-cocaine, it’s not a good thing. Essentially they took a dubiously ethical business and ramped it into, “actively harmful to almost everyone”. Any reasonable country would ban half the ads that make it onto FB/Insta. FB themselves admit 10% of their ad traffic is literal scammers.

Sure, but youre just talking about semantics here. When Mark asks himself "have we been successful" your definition of success is irrelevant. If the lay offs were because of the company had no successes as the OP posits you have to reason from the decision makers definition of success.

Re: 2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March

#98

Post by nradov »

jordanb wrote: post #65
ProllyInfamous wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Watching their demo video was the perfect encapsulation of "this was not made for users" I have ever seen. First of all the idea of hanging out in a digital world with Mark Zuckerberg is so bleak. I can't imagine a worse hang. But other than that, it was all about working in a digital office, being advertised to, etc. They had this scene where one of Zuck's definitely-real friends is excited about "this new street ar…

I guess they read William Gibson's 2007 novel Spook Country and tried to build that. It had virtual street art as a plot device.

https://williamgibsonbooks.com/#books

Re: 2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March

#99

Post by xorcist »

jjmarr wrote: post #25
mc32 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m down for that. There are so many “facilitators” in middle management, some really good and quite a few bad ones and many making no difference. I don’t know how people thought they were good positions to hire for. Remember before Covid many a company deadweight showing us the vast amounts of unwork they did at their companies on their YouTube videos? Proudly showing how idle they were? Not all the firings are dead…

In a zero interest rate environment, literally any return on investment justifies spending. If interest rates are 3.8%, the company needs at least a 3.8% return every year on your yearly compensation to justify your job.

That's .. not at all how interest rates work.

Re: 2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March

#100

Post by ashleyn »

napolux wrote: post #3

AI 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 developers.

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