May 2024: The tech layoffs have oversaturated the USA tech job market.

I got laid off last week as a software engineering leader (Director). WIth 27 years as a software engineer, this is the worst I have ever seen it. It's a perfect storm: Section 174 of the tax code kicking in, Interest rates sky high so money is too expensive to borrow, and an election year where companies are waiting to see who gets into office before they spend - It's downright terrible. This will have an instant impact where the US falls way behind china and india. A lot of us are going to leave the field - sure tech pays the best, but when its watch your family starve and go homeless or take on 3 menial jobs, you take on those 3 jobs and eventually you grow in one of them. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of our engineers started working for companies overseas now. I keep thinking, well, we had a good run.

Fellow software engineer. Jobless 15 months. Currently homeless 🥺

I got laid off this week. My company makes billions, my division makes millions. But, still they released us. It's all greed. It's not good enough to be profitable. You have to make all the money and then some. It's gotten out of control. The government needs to wake up and stop allowing so many acquisitions and break up these larger companies. Greed and lack of competition is killing innovation and American jobs.

When you work on something that only has the capacity to make you 5 dollars, it does not matter how much harder you work – the most you will make is 5 dollars.

My current lead software engineer was previously a Director at a same size company that laid him off. Needless to say, he's completely disengaged in all the meetings after being forced to down level. My current manager used to be an cloud solutions architect and now has to manage and code 50-50 of his daily time to keep his job. I have to review his code sometimes. Help me lord! The market inside and outside is BRUTAL.

Been employed solid for 20 years as a truck driver, two paid off homes, corvette, pickup and a boat. always knew this time would come. God speed Tech workers, hope you all find good income. These corporations are all absolutely ruthless, never forget that. Did you not think the tech companies wouldn't do the same thing Detroit did to the American auto worker? HELLO?

The truth is those jobs never existed in the first place. Many were created just to gloat for investors and show "continuous growth" And the missing positions... many of them were filled by people who were working 1-2h per day if that (as many of the "A day in the life of a software engineer at ..) clearly showed. In addition, overinflated titles earning big money but not producing the required ROI through no fault of their own in many cases - This is why taking 1/2 levels down of demotion is actually just normalizing the market. Companies figured out that they get a Principal developer abroad for $120K vs a Junior developer locally for the same price so that contributed to this as well. Hard pill to swallow but the market is never coming back as it was 1-2 years ago. There are too many forces at play: AI, Outsourcing, Offshoring, SAAS solutions, Cloud solutions, Low code, No code etc. They are all putting a dent in demand for SWE.

Got laid off a week ago very suddenly. In the middle of work at the office, got pulled aside with a few other software engineers and that was it, no access to our company accounts after a quick pep talk that everything is going to be ok. Business became inhumane.

A software engineer with empathy and compassion?! You sir, have earned my subscription. I agree, I was laid off by a fortune 50 company mid April, I’m a mid-senior level engineer but I’m actively considering junior roles or even switching my tech stack and expertise entirely (data to web dev )

I really hate saying this. This answer is greed. Plain and simple. I REALLY want to be wrong, but I firmly believe that companies are mad at us for making them rich, and they see tech salaries outside the US as the answer. I have 7 YoE and I was unemployed for 15 months, submitted thousands of applications, did hundreds of interviews, and after SEVEN final rounds I finally got a job. In all honesty, it's pure luck that I was referred and found for this role as well. If only non-tech people knew how much we ACTUALLY do when we're not even on the clock. I've made companies more money while thinking in the shower compared to ANY meeting. It's really all a** backwards. The worst part about this tech market is being gaslit by everyone.

I WAS a hiring manager at Amazon and had an open role. I was REQUIRED to fill that slot from Costa Rica as it was “cheaper labor”!

I've been working professionally for 28 years now and I have never seen so many people trying to "break into tech" all at once. It's almost laughable. And the majority of you want to do it just for the money. I'm sorry but that's not how it works. Companies know this and are pushing back. All of this has made a mockery of professional software development. The experienced among us has had a long career full of passion and continuous learning among other things. For those of you who have a real interest and passion for software development, you are just going to have to be a bit more patient until most of these other people who just want to make "the big bucks" are weeded out. Interesting times for sure.

every year we import tens of thousands of indians on h1b. why can't we hire our own people instead?

US has to start putting tariffs on all of these offshore work. These companies love to shift jobs on lower cost countries and yet wants to earn money in the US market - the market they don't want to hire in. You can even see it in Glassdoor reviews where there is a recent theme of US workers being the first to go as their company moves job to other countries.

It’s hard to go by LinkedIn numbers. That’s because of carpet bombing (the same remote job listed for all 50 states) and ghost jobs - created so the recruiter can look busy and collect resumes. But yes. The market is terrible. I was laid off last May and it was rough. I’ll probably be laid off this week and the market is worse.

I bounce between Texas and Oregon. Oregon tech scene is dead. And when you see paper signs on doors at Buc-ee's and QT gas stations and Panda Express offering 60 to 100K for store managers and assistant store managers, that's pretty decimating to one's hopes and sacrifices of spending years learning to code and building a career in coding/ IT/ etc when a field is so specialized is now worth 40 to 60k. Its worth more to society to count cash and manage people than it is to write software and maintain the infrastructure the is baseline for this modern world. Big Tech is its own worst enemy and with armies of software engineers and devs with no work, I think it will eventually come around to bite Big Tech in the *ss. What most of you all haven't figure out is how POWERFUL your skills are - you are busy scrambling to find another job that keeps you enslaved to insecure jobs when you should be banding together to decentralize society to make life better for all of humanity. All you techies do not realize your full potential or your full power because you have had to live under their thumb - now you are free to build a better world.

20 year QA professional here. 2 years of no QA role. No calls. Nothing. It is depressing. Lost my place. Lost a lot. Can’t survive of off 21.00 an hour. So sad. And US companies don’t seem to care one bit.

I left the tech industry in the early '90s; I could see the writing on the wall. With engineers being laid off, companies constantly changing hands, and the bar for entry-level positions ever-increasing, it was clear to me that my future in this field would be a constant struggle, marked by boom and bust cycles. Did I miss out on the boom? Yes. But I also missed out on the anguish of being unemployed in the 3 crashes we've had since the 90s.

I wonder how the industry will look like 10 years from now if we continue to do this. There won't be any "new" senior level engineers if we cut off the oxygen to juniors and just offshore those positions

I'm actually surprised the numbers are even this good. I get it, they're bad, but they feel a lot worse than this right now.