What’s going to happen to Big Tech’s laid off workers?

Intro:

150,000 tech workers have been laid off in 2022 alone. Amazon today announcing it's going to cut 18,000 workers. And we're going to see more, it's going to continue to weave through the public and private market. Is the tech bubble bursting again? The layoffs in big tech, which started in 2022 left many wondering if this is just the tip of the iceberg. So what does this mean for these workers as well as those aspiring to join the tech industry, especially when the economic outlook remains uncertain? Technology is a part of our everyday lives and a necessity for most societies to simply function. This increasing dependency has seen huge growth in the tech sector and with it, a proliferation of high paying jobs. But following the industry's recent struggles, those exorbitant salaries are now being scrutinized like never before. In early 2023, California, Washington and Rhode Island joined several other U.S. states and cities in enacting salary transparency laws, which require companies to post salary ranges for job postings. In California, which is home to more than 20% of the world's Fortune 500 companies, a program manager at Apple can make between $121,000 and $230,000, a mid-career software engineer at Google will receive between $126,000 and $190,000, while a software engineering director at Meta can draw a minimum of $253,000 and as much as $327,000 per year.

Salary expectations

But following mass layoffs for tech workers, are these wage expectations still realistic? Ben Leong is a professor of computer science at the National University of Singapore. What has happened in the last three or four years is that pay for the other non big-tech companies have got up and many of the startups are really upset because they can't burn cash at those rates. They can't pay $7–8k to fresh grads. The big tech companies will continue to pay what they used to pay. They always pay a lot. I suspect that the growth in the median pay will either stagnate or may even drop. Teoh Shun Jun falls within the brackets of the median pay earner. The former Tencent data analyst engineer was let go by the Chinese tech giant at its Singapore office in 2022. Around end of September, I received a news via my agent so she dropped me a text asking me if I'm free to chat. At that time I was halfway through my contract. She had to tell me that Tencent was laying me off because of cross-cutting exercises. It was quite sad to be honest, and it wasn't just me that was affected, at least five of my teammates also received the same news around the same timing. While drawing a healthy salary remains important, that isn't a priority for Shun Jun. When I finished my diploma, I honestly didn't know that data personnels were being paid that high. I do it out of passion instead of the pay. You definitely can find higher-paying jobs in bigger tech companies. But, at my age, it's better to just develop my soft skills and my technical skills first before I move on to bigger roles and more responsibilities.

Jobs in other industries

Against the backdrop of a shrinking job market in the tech industry, some software engineers and data scientists are reassessing their future career plans. According to a report by executive outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, U.S.-based employers in the technology sector announced nearly 53,000 job cuts in November 2022 alone, the highest monthly total for the sector since the company began tracking industry data at the end of the 20th century. A separate report found that tech occupations in all industry sectors grew by 137,000 positions in the same month, the top three U.S. employers hailed from the Health Insurance, Defence and Banking sectors respectively. There are more jobs that are software engineering jobs outside the tech industry than in the tech industry. So to some degree, I would say the labor markets are much more resilient. There's not an auto company that doesn't need software engineers, there is not an energy company that doesn't need software engineers, there's not a retailer or a bank that doesn't need software engineers. So, I would imagine to the degree to which there's over supply in one, there will be more even distribution. Shun Jun's own research has yielded similar results. I know that the market right now is hard but I also keep my eyes open to other industries. Healthcare and banks are definitely stable in Singapore. The property industry in Singapore is starting to boom. The friends that were affected, a few of them landed in banks, it sounded like they were contract roles. I have a friend that went to a decent local IT company here. He managed to find a job before he received the news. Hence, he was able to get a decent salary.

Bootcamps

Before the recent round of layoffs, fresh graduates and mid-career professionals looking to break into the tech industry were attending specialized training courses, including coding bootcamps in droves. But are these boot camps still relevant? According to market research firm HolonIQ, more than 100,000 professionals enrolled in tech boot camps globally in 2021, up from less than 20,000 in 2015. John Fong is the vice president and chief operating officer for APAC at General Assembly, one of several schools offering such bootcamps. Whenever there are mass layoffs, we typically see an increase in the interest in our programs. One of the main criterias that we have for instructors is that they need to be industry practitioners. They need to have been there done that, bought the t-shirt, so to speak, for them to be able to bring the real-world, those projects, those portfolios into the classroom; it's really important for that curriculum. 90% of our students get a job within six months of graduation. According to 2021 data, four coding bootcamps had employment rates of at least 80% in a related field within a year. Three of these four reported better rates than graduates of the University of Pennsylvania, and Johns Hopkins University's four year degree programs. But some questioned the effectiveness of these boot camps compared with university programs in preparing students for higher-profile jobs that rely on advanced knowledge and skills. Fundamentally, for coding bootcamps, you are actually running up to the kind of the limits of human learning. Six months, you just can't learn enough. And there's also a problem of market readiness. What the bootcamp is trying to do is they try to train students to get the jobs right away. Most of the jobs that they can do will be what's called the front-end jobs like HTML, CSS, some JavaScript, maybe. So it's very difficult, I think for the bootcamp folks to learn enough to do the back-end work. There is a class of companies that don't pay so well, and they kind of get the best engineers anyway, so they may make do with the good campus. Nevertheless, John remains steadfast in his view that General Assembly's courses are comprehensive enough for its prospective students. Yes, we provide the fundamental skills. We also provide career coaching services. When the students come through to us, our career coaches work with them from day one, brushing up their LinkedIn profiles, their resumes, interview skills, and so on. Looking at the networking that we have, the alumni that we have, it's a cult-like following for us.To date, we've got more than 1.4 million people that have attended our classes, workshops and events. 80,000 alumni all around the world.The outlook for big tech's laid-off workers hinges in large part on the complicated relationship between the U.S. and China, which could benefit job seekers in certain parts of the world. I think one of the major factors today is the U.S.-China relationship. After their relationship soured, both sides have sort of given up on each other and they decide to come to Southeast Asia, which is another big market. From a macro perspective, I think many companies both Chinese as well as U.S., would use Singapore as a base. China has been making some really surprising moves in recent times. You see them clamping down first on tuition industry and so they overnight killed all the big tech companies. Question marks remain over how long these layoffs will last. But Ben is hopeful that the job market will bounce back even if the industry has to reinvent itself. Even if Meta goes under tomorrow, there will be a new company that will take its place, they will still hire engineers at high pay. There's this company called Sun Microsystems, which was the biggest thing when I graduated, they were the Facebook of that era, and then they were no more. The current Facebook campus is actually the previous Sun campus. If the recession comes fine, two, three years, they're gonna recover and then hiring will start again. And as long as those guys are good with what they do, I think they can still find jobs.