Name: Why Widespread Tech Layoffs Keep Happening Despite A Strong U.S. Economy
Uploaded: 2024-02-25T03:26:23.000Z
Duration: 12 min 18 s
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Unknown: Hi, Bernie. Hi. Thanks for meeting with me. And Rosie.

We have an important meeting today. We finished our

evaluations of 2023 performance. This is where you have not met

Cloudflare expectations for performance. We've decided to

This is a viral video posted by Brittany Pietsch, a former

employee of CloudFlare, a San Francisco based tech company.

The video posted on January 2024, and got so much attention

that it may have kicked off a new sub genre of viral video

watch this person get laid off in real time. The tech industry

is again seeing widespread layoffs after a rough 2023

laid off nearly 700 employees. Qualcomm is planning to cut more

Amazon and Snap are among the companies continuing to downsize

in the start of 2024 seems no different as layoff

announcements, especially in the tech industry continue to make

Units affected they also include hardware engineering, ad sales

so far last night CEO Sundar Pichai told his workforce to

Kate Rooney: and Amazon spokesperson did confirm those

layoffs ahead of prime and prime video and MGM saying in that

memo that the company is making some of the cuts to prioritize

Unknown: are also plaguing industries like healthcare,

banking and media, whoever the tech industry is the one that's

Devyn Rafols-Nunez: layoff and everything that's happened in

tech, I think is pretty eye opening. You know, like, you can

have your dream job, you can have your Oh, it's my dream to

work for Microsoft or it's my dream to work for AWS. And you

get there and you realize, huh, okay, it's just like any other

job. It's a great place to be. There's a lot of great perks,

but at the end of the day, you can get rid of you like that

Unknown: the layoffs to the start of 2024 signal a dramatic

shift in the tech industry, we're going to continue to see

layoffs happen as the future of work has changed as the future

of technology has changed. And as investors the appetite for

risk and growth versus profitability has dramatically

So why are big tech companies and other industries laying off

10s of 1000s of workers at a time when the US economy looks

The start of the Covid 19 pandemic was a dire economic

event, at least at first. The tech industry though, boomed in

2020, Tech's top seven companies added $3.4 trillion dollars in

value. The feds emergency moves to bolster the pandemic hit

economy, like cutting interest rates to near zero helped boost

tech stocks. This move helped the tech industry to expand and

went on a hiring spree as people were confined to home. Amazon

added the most number of employees during this golden

period peaking at 1.6 million employees in 2021. If

you rewind before the layoffs, all the tech companies were

really putting an emphasis on growth. And so capital was

really cheap, you know, so you could get loans, you could get

money access to capital was really affordable. And then you

see as interest rates went up, and you start to see that that

growth in headcount didn't translate to growth and

profitability. And access to capital became quite a bit

tighter, you saw many companies start to hit the panic button.

And so we see saw these 1000s and 1000s of people get laid off

all at once. And that was quite a shocked 80%

of Twitter either left or quit or was pushed out laid off

whatever you want to call it. And yet the website still runs.

Do you think people are looking at Elon Musk and thinking, You

know what, we really need all these people.

I do get Elon Musk credit for this for kicking off and making

this acceptable Twitter, but a lot of the big companies decided

to get lean and efficient. And you know, this is where you kind

of start to see the incredible leverage of what these tech

platforms really have, which is they didn't need those people,

right? They were hoarding the talent. It was an option that

I asked every tech CEO, do you take inspiration for what Elon

does? And they'll say on the record? No, we don't we would

never want to do that. But, you know, in the group chats,

they're all like, wow, that was an amazing move.

The artificial intelligence hype of 2023 is starting to have real

world effects in 2024 major tech CEOs are doubling down their

investments in AI. In January 2024, meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg

announced his plans to build an artificial general intelligence

Today I'm bringing Meta's AI research efforts closer together

to support our long term goals. Building general intelligence,

open sourcing it responsibly, and making it available and

in all of our daily lives. All this investment in creating AI

jobs, but at the end spends of others, the recent report from

indeed shows that the number of job posts containing Gen AI

So there's about a 500% increase in the number of jobs that

mentioned generative AI, there's about a 6,000% increase in the

demand from job seekers for these jobs. But there still is,

I think, a mismatch the other way, and that the total amount

of demand for AI talent far outstrips the number of AI

in every industry is trying to figure out how to use AI in

everything they do. I mean, AI is going to create a lot more

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Why Widespread Tech Layoffs Keep Happening Despite A Strong U.S. Economy

absolutely

pandemic

access

prioritize