[poloman]

Reports suggest that 30-40% of the people who were laid of in US companies are Indians on immigrant visas. Linkedin is filled with posts from such people, that they have only 2 months to land in a new job or may have to leave US. What normally happen to such people? In current scenario even half of them are not going to get a decent job in 2 months? Can they stay on using some loopholes?

Presumably most of them might have done higher studies in US and huge education loans to service.

[tracerspiff]

As someone who recently woke up to a nonfunctioning email and disconnected Slack, here are my $0.02.

I knew that these inflated salaries were just a blip and I made my share of hay while the sun shone so brilliantly. I was mentally prepared for a correction but I am a little overwhelmed by the sheer scale of it.

Even though I was expecting something to happen soon, it did sting a little when you wake up on a Monday morning and find the access cut off.

Since I always had the gut feeling that bad days are ahead, I have enough squirreled away to last me at least 2 years. My only worry is the gap in my resume the longer it takes for me to land another job.

[NiInJa]

Layoffs are bad, especially when they happen due to no mistake of yours, and when you are not given a proper explanation and treated inhumanly. I for one lost all faith in HR talking anything about commitment to organization. The organization may have 1000s of employees to look after, but an employee devotes his mind, time and energy to just the organization he works for. So the least organizations and the HR can do is provide a proper closure to the individual employee, after all, that is what they are looking for.

I've been a part of a layoff, but it was less stressful because the seniors amongst us found a new company immediately and absorbed all 40 of us who were let go, into it.

During the call when this redundancy was announced, the management from U.S. did not clearly tell us what was the exact reason of doing so and just gave some extremely vague answers bordering on laughable, especially when they were VPs and Senior Directors. On Linkedin they are Heroes of the 'Jargon Matrix' but here, they were choking and stuttering to give a proper explanation. The HR actually interrupted us and told us to have a 'one on one' later to get any clarification. Some junior folks literally laughed out of the conference room saying they could not take it anymore.

[digitalnirvana]

Originally Posted by Latheesh

CEO Sundar Pichai told employees in an email today that he takes “full responsibility for the decisions that led us here."

What difference statements like these makes? or do they expect someone else to take the responsibility?

Leaving this here.
/filler text

[Malyaj]

It helps to have some understanding of how your company makes money, rather than just thinking that I have done my job for the day. Of course, it is not mandatory, but helps. Far too many people are mentally detached from the financial health of their company (or its ability to be in good financial health). It is easy for a startup with little fixed assets to decide to fold up. Applies to 'new initiatives' of big companies too. Can't really blame employees in big companies. It is not possible for everyone to be privy to such data.

Everyone is in love with the asset light model, and believe that the money saved can be spent on marketing blitzkrieg or fancy offices. In the end the world needs only so many aggregators or apps that act as intermediaries. If they are not supported by an underlying real economy of physical goods or useful services, correction is bound to happen.

The couch potato in me says that the world is moving insanely fast and in only one dimension. It needs to slow down and check if everyone is benefitting. Wages at the bottom of the pyramid have not grown at the same rate. Our maids, cooks, iron guys, delivery boys etc don't see explosive growth in their earnings even over decades. Such kind of growth which is driven by the affluent and benefits only the affluent is not sustainable. Seeing the crazy investments in startups over the last decade (and even beyond), one can't help but feel that global capital has gotten allocated without much thought.

This phase of layoffs will also recede and we will be back to hiring sprees in a year, maybe less. What is a constant is that we in India have some of the worst income inequalities in the world and continue to ignore it. The real story is of people who don't earn enough to save, who have zero inherited wealth, who don't have LinkedIn accounts, do not inhabit forums, have to contend with 'trickle down' layoffs, but never 'trickle down' wealth.

Sorry for the socialist rant.

[m8002?]

Originally Posted by tracerspiff

As someone who recently woke up to a nonfunctioning email and disconnected Slack, here are my $0.02.

I knew that these inflated salaries were just a blip and I made my share of hay while the sun shone so brilliantly. I was mentally prepared for a correction but I am a little overwhelmed by the sheer scale of it.

Even though I was expecting something to happen soon, it did sting a little when you wake up on a Monday morning and find the access cut off.

Since I always had the gut feeling that bad days are ahead, I have enough squirreled away to last me at least 2 years. My only worry is the gap in my resume the longer it takes for me to land another job.

Good for you. You knew exactly what you were getting into and are/were prepared for the bloodbath.

But many of them aren't so prepared. They think its their right to demand 200% hike and expect the company to NOT downsize when things go downwards. People dont take a moment to think if those kind of salaries are sustainable long term ( and long term seems to be 6 months these days ).
And for those who upgraded their lifestyle by 2 times, its more trouble.

And I still dont understand why can't the companies say no to such demands. As an employer, it was also their responsibility to think ahead if the salaries they were offering were sustainable.

[tracerspiff]

Originally Posted by m8002?

And for those who upgraded their lifestyle by 2 times, its more trouble.

And I still dont understand why can't the companies say no to such demands. As an employer, it was also their responsibility to think ahead if the salaries they were offering were sustainable.

You mentioned an important point. My wife and I were very careful to not let our lifestyle expenses go up. The only area I splurged was on a car(Duh!).

On your second point, I think it was the companies(mainly freshly funded startups) that encouraged these high salaries. My ex-company is a prime example. They offered crazy salaries to attract top talent and definitely played a part in the ballooning salaries.

[fnftech]

During covid times i remember the hiring spree of these IT companies it were like so called efficient programmers and all were under auction attracting maximum bid from everyone, the moment covid started to wane there was pressure on those new projects & since then industry in general started to struggle there by sending hints about impeding layoffs as the most preferred medium of cost saving/cuttings, i am of the opinion that these are the times when even all healthy & profitable companies also try to correct their financial structure by getting themselves camouflaged in this chaos. Its just a correction which occurs once or twice a decade & its part of that vicious cycle anyone can be exposed to, this WFH concept got carried on for too long disturbing the natural professional office setup with which these companies operated making it easier for them to cherry pick the unwanted & give excuses.

[VKumar]

Gentlemen, it's basically a cycle IMO. What selfish people and founders started, it's coming back to bite them.

I have seen people quit in the middle of some important project, when company actually needs them - they return with an offer to match. The offer is matched, the man is now paid higher. And then comes the turn of companies, when the job market is dried up - now they are feeding the same guy his own medicine. Companies too need to make profits after all.

Google had an over 20% rise in manpower cost YoY for last few years, suddenly investors demanded the alphabet to cut on the manpower cost - they followed, simple.

Who is worst affected?
The guys who ran to banks for the big housing or car loans right on the day of joining a new job.

[ohaak]

Useful website for data crunching on Layoffs - https://layoffs.fyi/

[Artyom]

I have not been able to read all the comments but the ones i read still dont help me to answer the below questions which have been bothering me for quite a while. Can someone please shed some light on them:-

1. Are majority of these Layoffs for a particular IT skillet like Programming or Software developers or HR etc or is it across all IT domains ?
2. Is the criteria for layoffs based upon how much you are earning, as in Employee X who Earns more than ABC per year will be sacked or is it a blanket firing to just reduce the head count?
3. I see most of the layoffs are in the top IT companies what we call the cream OR is this prevalent in smaller companies also?
4.People who are on reasonable package are at less risk of losing jobs. Is that a correct assumption? Reasonable package by Industry standards I mean and not the atrocious numbers we saw during the recent hiring. :-)

[PreludeSH]

Originally Posted by Artyom

I have not been able to read all the comments but the ones i read still dont help me to answer the below questions which have been bothering me for quite a while. Can someone please shed some light on them:-

1. Are majority of these Layoffs for a particular IT skillet like Programming or Software developers or HR etc or is it across all IT domains ?
2. Is the criteria for layoffs based upon how much you are earning, as in Employee X who Earns more than ABC per year will be sacked or is it a blanket firing to just reduce the head count?
3. I see most of the layoffs are in the top IT companies what we call the cream OR is this prevalent in smaller companies also?
4.People who are on reasonable package are at less risk of losing jobs. Is that a correct assumption? Reasonable package by Industry standards I mean and not the atrocious numbers we saw during the recent hiring. :-)

Its all based on ROI. For Amazon, if orders are going down, delivery is affected, marketing to some extent since the sector itself is seeing sluggish growth.

Some companies might still think high payers will be beneficial and continue investing in things they might see rebounding high.

Its also true that they might not think too much and layoff for short term advantages, pacify investors etc

[Zinger_Winger]

Originally Posted by deehunk

I pity those individuals who hop between jobs just for salary hikes and incentives, one will be paid the best if that position/skill deserves a high salary.

That statement unfortunately is quite short-sighted, generalizing & mean to an extent, towards folks trying to search for someone who values their skillset more than the current employer. It is not right to judge everybody with a single yardstick, without knowing the entire context of why people leave a job or start searching for better paying options.

Here's one of the most common examples:

When within the same team, employees working for 2-3 years are being paid around the range of an X amount, here comes a new recruit at the same designation, who is hired at X+40 to 50% increment. These salary figures are usually not a well-kept secret for too long (there's a reason why HR scares people to not discuss their figures to anybody, they know they're not truly just towards everybody and employee renumeration parity is a joke), it raises innumerable questions and doubts within the older employees and leads them to think that the company doesn't truly value their efforts and can easily pay someone from the market, who is yet to prove their mettle in the current role such high numbers but when the time comes for the same 2-3 year old employees to be awarded bonuses and increments, managers always bring up the overly used and abused 'bell-curve'.

Instead of sulking and suffering in that same team and being resentful towards business that values an 'outsider' more than somebody who has worked there for so long, instead of continuing to work half-heartedly, people usually tend to move out, looking for similar levels of increment that their current company just paid the new joiner.

If another company is willing to value their experience and skill-sets, employees will go out to them, it's just that simple. There is truly no need to pity somebody who's playing the game that is being played by everybody.
This is just like saying 'I pity the person, who takes multiple quotes from Spinny, OLX, Carwale, CarDekho when they should just sell it off to the local dealer, that's paying them lesser than what these vendors could have paid.

[JoshMachine]

An interesting analysis doing the rounds, worth a read. Not sure if it has been discussed here already..

It says - Apple grew slower than others, hence doing less layoffs?! - source

Extracts from the article captured in the form of some graphs:-





Also, copy of Sundar Pichai's memo to Google employees facing the axe - listed here.

[gopalnt]

Originally Posted by m8002?

Aren't the execs in these companies paid millions of dollars exactly to foresee and act on these projections. If they panic and react like a newbie, then why pay them the crazy salaries? Whats the point in taking "full responsibility" and taking home a few "more" million dollars in bonus since you increased the share price and struck to the bottom line?

Like someone mentioned earlier, the pendulum has swung fully to the other side now. But the sad part is when the layoffs come, they don't differentiate between the job hopper who changed jobs every 6 months and the loyal employee who slogged for 6 or 16 years in the same company.

If you take 2 sides - Management and Employees, it is us, the employees, who made this situation. Employees in a current company were getting 100% to 300% hike somewhere without any change to skill last year. It was VC funded, cash burning startups who started this trend of doling out huge sums. It forced current employers to provide out of turn hikes (remember Microsoft gave 2 hikes last year), hire more people for huge sum as well. US had high inflation and employees used this as another reason to demand additional hikes. All these added up costs in enormous proportions. In a way, companies last year paid as salaries what they generally do in two years.

And then the startups went bust, recession came, too many employees with high salaries and things are going downhill.