Original Reddit discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1t31dic/big_tech_cut_80000_jobs_and_blamed_ai_experts_say/
Original Reddit discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1t31dic/big_tech_cut_80000_jobs_and_blamed_ai_experts_say/
I can’t speak for other fields, but I’ve worked in IT as a sysadmin for about a decade at a bunch of different companies, big and small.
I’ve never worked at a place that was close to “overstaffed” nearly every place I’ve worked we’ve needed at least 2-4 additional people on staff.
Everybody was overworked, overwhelmed with tickets and projects, working 50+ hours a week constantly.
But upper management and executives love claiming that staffing is maxed out and needs to get more lean. Like, dude, our IT team is handling dozens of tickets a day, running 5-10 different infrastructure projects simultaneously, and keeping near-decade old equipment alive because we were denied our third budget request in a row.
In 30 years of employment, I’ve never had a job where any department at any company I’ve been with seemed properly staffed to say nothing of overstaffed.
Add onto that, the fact that upper management is 4 or 5 people deep as well. Basically more management than workers.
I imagine, this is more about software devs than sysadmins. Sure, you’ll hire a couple more sysadmins to help with the massive user growth during the pandemic. But especially combined with loans basically being made free in the same time, it’s suddenly worth hiring a bunch of devs to build the Next Big Thing™.
Once those loans start costing again and the user numbers fall off, you quickly have lots of devs that you can’t find tasks for, that are worth doing.