The Great Tech Reset: Unpacking The Layoff Surge Of 2024

Forbes ^ | August 19, 2024 | Emil Sayegh

[wildcard_redneck]

In a stunning reversal, the tech industry—once the unstoppable engine of modern innovation—has laid off over 124,000 workers in 2024 alone. What’s driving this wave of layoffs, and what does it mean for the future of work in one of the world’s most dynamic sectors?

The Layoff Landscape

In August 2024, Intel sent shockwaves through the market by announcing a 15% reduction in its global workforce—roughly 15,000 jobs. Just days later, Cisco Systems announced plans to lay off 7% of its employees, marking its second round of job cuts this year as the company shifts focus to rapidly growing areas like artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. Earlier in February 2024, Cisco laid off more than 4,000 employees.

These are not isolated incidents. According to Layoffs.fyi, 384 tech companies have laid off more than 124,000 employees in 2024, adding to the 428,449 tech workers who lost their jobs in 2022 and 2023. While the broader labor market has shown some resilience, the tech sector's cuts are particularly visible due to the sheer scale of these companies. Even a small percentage reduction translates to thousands of lives and families upended.

[wildcard_redneck]

Big Tech across the board laid off 15% of their workforce worldwide in 2024. In this country they fired mainly Americans and yet they're still importing H1B visa indentured servants like crazy. It is colonization and ethnic replacement by our own federal government and multinational corporations that bribe politicians for the privilege of replacing native born Americans of all colors with cheap indentured servants.

It needs to end.

[grey_whiskers]

Concur.

[Macoozie]

An accurate assessment.

[Spktyr]

A lot of these layoffs (this time...) is companies shedding the useless DEI hires and cutting staff bloat - see all the people so proud about working at a Silicon Valley company where they only had to work 4 hours a day and had this in-office wine bar that they hung out at for hours. Or worse, the above, but the 4 hours was spent on ensuring proper workforce diversity.

[Carry_Okie]

Six hundred thousand tech layoffs in the last three years, and I'd bet a majority of those deluded idiots voted for Biden.

Learn to code? Now AI will eat those careers alive.

Capital replaces labor. To those who love low interest rates, making capital cheap to borrow has its consequences. I know it makes for more investments, but expensive borrowing does focus it upon those uses that provide a real profit.

[musicman]

BFLR

[adorno]

Even a small percentage reduction translates to thousands of lives and families upended.

Corporations or businesses, do not exist for the purposes of just creating work. If DOGE is okay for government, the private sector equivalent should be just as welcome. When a business operates efficiently and the need for workers decreases, then, layoffs will occur. The need for H1Bs should also decrease; layoffs is not the same as replacing regular American workers with H1B workers. Reductions in staffs is a worldwide situation.

Only government creates jobs for the sake of employing more people (while making the government leaders look good) and not because they're needed.

[grey_whiskers]

Eh, not so sure about AI.

I do know that Google, Microsoft, Amazon etc. have spent over $100 BILLION in 2023-2024 on AI infrastructure.

If they don’t start getting some astounding customer $$$ from using AI soon, all that money is going to be a total write-off.

(Because Moore’s Law, and the next generation of chips having twice the price performance, your competitor can buy the next gen chips and undercut you on price...*if* even they can break even.)

AI is plagiarism in the rear-view mirror, a solution looking for a problem.

There are a few coding types which can trivailly be done by AI: but many simply cannot, and coders report increased time by 30% or so, trying to get the prompts “just right” so that the code will do what is actually required, or without hallucinations.

But when all the low-hanging fruit is taken, will the lack of demand doom AI because of the costs?

The tech bros are blinded by their own marketing copy.

[wildcard_redneck]

The reptiles ruling us call ethnic replacement and genocide "diversity" and laugh at native born Americans.

Americans have been replaced in Silicon Valley.

The table below is from SILICON VALLEY INDICATORS at https://siliconvalleyindicators.org/data/people/talent-flows-diversity/nativity/foreign-born-share-of-employed-residents-over-age-16-by-occupational-category-table/

Foreign Born Share of Employed Residents Over Age 16, by Occupational Category Santa Clara & San Mateo Counties, 2019
		Ages 25-44
	All	Women	Men	Both
Tech Occupations	64%	70%	62%	64%
Computer & Mathematical	65%	71%	63%	65%
Architectural & Engineering	61%	66%	59%	61%
Natural Sciences	50%	50%	50%	50%
Medical & Health Services	51%	52%	51%	51%
Financial Services	45%	53%	35%	45%
Other Occupations	43%	43%	44%	43%
Total	48%	47%	48%	48%

[wildcard_redneck]

What a surprise that a Zeeper is also Americans Last. It fits a disgusting pattern. If America is so short of talent why aren’t they hiring on the laid off people? It’s because they want indentured servants, cheap labor, and to diminish the political power of native born American citizens of all colors.

[Carry_Okie]

I hate what those corporate creeps on Sand Hill Rd. have done to this State. The imports are totally ignorant about limited government under Constitutional law, they know NOTHING about local ecology, fire hazards, anything, and are therefore easily led by the nose into impossible rule sets.

They drive like a-holes too.

[cross_bearer_02]

We use AI at our company, and have done so for about six months. In that time and in my experience with it, what I've found is:

• AI is excellent at giving you boilerplate code for the more mundane, day-to-day, cookie-cutter things an application needs. These are bits and pieces of code that are common to just about any project you'd work on, and not specific to your business. Of, that, there is no question, and it pays dividends there.
• What AI fails at, and sometimes spectacularly, is business-centric logic. That is to say, the bits of the applications where you have to have a full working knowledge of the business side of your business.

Essentially, AI makes for a great "cowboy coder," But it does a pretty poor job where working knowledge of your business is needed to produce specific code for an application or website. It falls over pretty quickly once that's introduced.

[dfwgator]

Also, can you be sure that AI-Generated code is secure? You still need people who can look at the generated code to make sure it doesn’t have any security holes.

[GaltAdonis]

“ …only had to work 4 hours a day and had this in-office wine bar that they hung out at for hours. …”

.

. “ in-office wine bar ”?

.

Heck this isn’t the 80’s, man…. (Yeah, those were the days…)

[GailA]

I skip over Amazon’s AI review., And read the reviews. You learn more. Avoid low review items. Don’t like QR’s either.

[cross_bearer_02]

Nope. If you're needing security-critical code and you're using AI, I would highly advise going over the code with a fine-toothed comb.

[GailA]

41% of companies worldwide plan to reduce workforces by 2030 due to AI

https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/08/business/ai-job-losses-by-2030-intl/index.html

Artificial intelligence is coming for your job: 41% of employers intend to downsize their workforce as AI automates certain tasks, a World Economic Forum survey showed Wednesday.

[dfwgator]

Which kind of defeats the whole purpose.

[wildcard_redneck]

"41% of companies worldwide plan to reduce workforces by 2030 due to AI"

And yet, in spite of all this labor dislocation and the ongoing Big Technforce reduction the federal government and multinational corporations still want to import indentured servants and leave native born Americans of all colors unemployed, marginalized and destitute.

It appears the ballot box is no longer working.

[wildcard_redneck]

AI cannot create an advanced programs from scratch, its only use in programming and development is for small discreet procedures that a programmer still has to weave together and ensure that it works correctly. For t is an aid. Not a replacement.

Where AI really shines is dealing with unstructured data that is almost impossible for a human program for. Task like “Analyze the data from this news article and create and return an entity relationship diagram in a Jason format.” After you get the date in the Jason format then a human can programmatically work with it.