Business Big Tech Layoffs Megathread - Techbros... we got too cocky...

Since my previous thread kinda-sorta turned into a soft megathread, and the tech layoffs will continue until morale improves, I think it's better to group them all together.

For those who want a QRD:

Just this week we've had these going on:

https://www.theverge.com/24048636/ebay-layoffs-1000-employees-january-2024

https://arstechnica.com/google/2024/01/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-promises-another-year-of-google-layoffs/

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/24/tech/sap-restructuring-ai-jobs-intl-hnk/index.html

But it's not just Big Tech, the vidya industry is also cleaning house bigly:

https://www.brokentoys.org/ludum-mortuus-est/

All in all, rough seas ahead for the techbros.

 

[AbendCode12]

You all have Karen's in your HR? Lucky. Here its all aged out cholos and jeets. Unless you can flash a gang sign or you're name is Srinivas Prasad Bindu Sanjay Rajesh Priya Sita Slushy, you're not getting past the screening. Every one being forced out here is a white man. I'm assuming some sort of alternative society is being formed somewhere because its a browning sea of despair.

 

[The Hardest R]

Every one being forced out here is a white man

This is the outcome that continues to be pushed. The leading candidates of the HR prescreens for the open positions at my job coincidentally are all DEI candidates or nepo babies. White guys don’t get prescreened or if they do, they’re at the bottom. HR will put in comments like “candidate does not grasp roles and responsibilities” and it’s a white kid who made the deans list every semester but the jeet who misspelled every other word is the leading candidate. Right.

A lot of the “applied to 100 jobs and heard back from two of them” are usually from white guys. DEI staffing targets are still alive and well and most of them have commitments like needing 30% of the company needing to be diverse by 2030. So yeah, no white guys. You have to bypass the HR process as much as possible if you want a shot.

 

[blargenheimer]

HR may be overcompensating more than ever to justify their importance.

Relevant


https://fortune.com/2026/05/19/bolt...causing-problems-fintech-startup-turn-around/

You know that every job listing gets blasted with x0,000 perfectly matched ai generated resumes right? Even before ai, people were sending fake resumes. There's no way a engineering manager has time to screen all of those. Unless you have a better way of doing a recruiter screen, karen from HR is the best you're going to get.

This is all well and good, if they can acknowledge they're application janitors that should be paid minimum wage. Filtering AI, browns/whites, and North Koreans. The moment they start evaluating any sort of technical ability while having zero themselves, they've lost the plot. In that case the HM is better off simply grabbing the first 50 applications and trashing the rest. The ratio of shit to shine would probably be the same and I trust my own or a HM's vibes more than HR's.


People are, on average, average. Every company demanding top talent with the utmost urgency to work on their agile venture AI slop, rather than slow methodological development that any qualified engineer will make it through, is the race to the bottom for everyone involved. Crabs in a bucket. Or monkeys at the bottom of stairs.

 

[sadrefrigerator]

This is all well and good, if they can acknowledge they're application janitors that should be paid minimum wage. Filtering AI, browns/whites, and North Koreans. The moment they start evaluating any sort of technical ability while having zero themselves, they've lost the plot. In that case the HM is better off simply grabbing the first 50 applications and trashing the rest. The ratio of shit to shine would probably be the same and I trust my own or a HM's vibes more than HR's.

Even if HR could magically recognize and reject AI, jeets and North Koreans, the amount of resumes they would pass would far outscale what the HM could reasonably look through. That's not even taking into account how many resumes you get that are full of lies that go beyond just embellishing experience. I had a candidate I interviewed that had a white sounding name, but a korean guy showed up. The linkedin link he gave was broken, but I found someone else with his name and address, along with the experience he listed. We figured out at that point it was a fabricated person and they sent someone else to pass the HM screen.
Recruiters aren't the ones pushing to do technical screening. HMs need to have some form of screening before resumes get to their eyes. Reality isn't even far off your example of the first X number of resumes getting passed along. There are just so many applicants today that if you apply too late after the listing is posted you have no chance of getting looked at.

Recruiter screens accomplish a number of tasks. They make sure theres a real person at the other end of the resume. They can check for obvious red flags like if the candidate sounds like hes in a call center, or if theres too much autism. Usually the HM has to give them some buzzwords to look for, or a list of technical questions and the answer they are looking for. Its not a good solution, but its the only thing that they can do right now. Even if your resume gets in front of the HM, theres no guarantee he'll choose to pass you. They look through dozens everyday and really don't have time to do more than skim past each one. You might be a perfect fit for the role, but get denied because the HM was in a bad mood or whatever bullshit.

Hiring is not perfect because its a difficult process that AI has made much worse on both sides. I don't know what the solution is. You can bitch about HR if it will make you feel better. For the forseeable future, you'll need a referral to get taken seriously.

 

[DavidS877]

People are, on average, average. Every company demanding top talent with the utmost urgency to work on their agile venture AI slop, rather than slow methodological development that any qualified engineer will make it through, is the race to the bottom for everyone involved. Crabs in a bucket. Or monkeys at the bottom of stairs.

I've been on the IT side(not software dev, more sysadmin) for many years. Outside one startup where I got to do everything, all my employers have had sane on-call rotations, 40 hour weeks, some night and weekend but usually scheduled well in advance and not as overtime.
And I tend to work on big stuff that people get angry when it breaks. There's no reason for a software developer to work more than 40 hours or nights and weekends on any regular basis, except perhaps supervising deployments. The code will still be there on Monday.