Tech companies laying off workers after pandemic hiring sprees

The real tech layoff story isn’t about decline.

The purple bar here represents how many new people various tech companies recruited in the last 3 years, the orange shows recent layoffs.

I’m amazed almost zero articles about the “impending tech collapse” have bothered to present this data for context.

Every layoff of 2023 has been a fraction of new headcount added in 2022 alone.

The real story is of poor planning.

This does not making being let go off any less horrendous .

This does not make any thoughtless process for it more excusable.

This post is nothing to do with the human story behind all of this. This post is about the broader business world.

The fact is what we see time and time in almost all economic data is a simple reversion to the norm.

It’s not that 2H and 1H 2023 is weird, it’s that 2020,2021 were deeply atypical

One of the questions we should be asking companies that hired so aggressively in 2022 is what were you thinking?

What data did you have that suggested Pandemic life was the new normal.

People need to spend longer in the real world and not reading the precise same stuff as people like them on the internet.

And we need to ask better questions.