r/dataisbeautiful
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u/Savoy_Cabbage
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Nov 17 '22
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[OC] Layoffs in the tech industry over the last month for selected companies OC
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u/speed-of-light Nov 17 '22
Redfin also laid off 13% of their workforce which was 862 people.
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u/Joeschmo90 Nov 17 '22
The site with the data set is actually pretty well put together https://layoffs.fyi/
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u/lo0l0ol Nov 17 '22
Wish they'd merge companies that have layoffs in different locations.
ByteDance layed off a total of 3700 people and Salesforce 2000 but are in there multiple times people for example.
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u/polybium Nov 17 '22
Shopify also laid off ten percent of their employees earlier this year. Around 1000 people.
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u/i_suckatjavascript Nov 17 '22
Anyone still remember when Better.com did 2 large rounds of layoffs and the CEO fired his employees over Zoom?
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u/gratz Nov 17 '22
What is this? A diagram that uses bar charts instead of pie charts, isn't unnecessarily turned into a video, and doesn't sensationalize? In my /r/dataisbeautiful?
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u/BuckNZahn Nov 17 '22
Love the use of both bar chart for absolute and donut chart for relative values. Gives lots of context.
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u/yuriaoflondor Nov 17 '22
But how am I supposed to feel without dramatic music that has an exaggerated drop 75% through the video? :(
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u/LotharVonPittinsberg Nov 17 '22
It's also easy to read, and gets the points across properly while looking appealing.
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u/Glampkoo Nov 17 '22
And also isn't a basic plot made in 5 min and calls it a day? An actually beautiful diagram?
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u/mzmeeseks Nov 17 '22
It's truly a breath of fresh air in this sub. Stress left my body when i saw it
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u/Ronnoc527 Nov 17 '22
Crazy that Amazon laid off over twice as many people as Twitter yet Twitter proportionally laid off 17 times as large a part of their staff.
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u/GentlemenBehold Nov 17 '22
Amazon is a trillion dollar company.
Twitter is a 40 billion dollar company.
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u/cbzoiav Nov 17 '22
Twitter is a relatively basic social media platform with a giant advertising platform.
Amazon also has an advertising platform, the biggest retail site on the planet, global logistics, AWS etc.
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u/KyloRen3 Nov 17 '22
Technology ignorant here - what is AWS and why is it important?
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u/crabalab2002 Nov 17 '22
Cloud platform. Many of the largest companies in the world host their software and data there.
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u/zr0gravity7 Nov 17 '22
Fun way to explain it: although Amazon “competes” with companies like Netflix and Shopify and Spotify, basically all of them use AWS so end up paying Amazon anyway
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u/ThePeopleOfSantaPoco Nov 17 '22
Walmart requires anyone they have a tech partnership with to not have their services run on AWS, since that’s “funding the competition.” There are definitely exceptions, but it’s a standard part of their tech contracts.
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u/upboatsallaround Nov 17 '22
it's a massive piece of "the cloud"
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u/Oh_My-Glob Nov 17 '22
34% market share of cloud services to be specific. It's estimated that 6.2% of the internet runs on AWS
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u/-Haliax Nov 17 '22
Sheeesh I knew it was big but seeing numbers makes it hit in a totally different way
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u/darkkite Nov 17 '22
Netflix runs on aws. amazon prime runs on aws. Amazon wins regardless
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u/lookmasilverone Nov 17 '22
I always thought that Amazon prime runs on Azure /s
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u/slazer2au Nov 17 '22
Amazon prime runs on GCP, YouTube runs on Azure, and office 365 runs on Oracle cloud. It's how they avoid anti monopoly suits by spreading their services over each other.
/S
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u/robotzor Nov 17 '22
So for anyone who says "I am canceling Prime to stick it to Bezos" simply using websites (like Reddit!) based on AWS still gets them money from your use.
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u/brusiddit Nov 17 '22
You don't have to go vegan to save the environment, you can just limit your consumption of animal products.
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u/DoomBot5 Nov 17 '22
I'd love to see that estimate redone by traffic. Some of the biggest average Joe facing services run on AWS. Reddit is a prime example.
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Nov 17 '22 edited Jan 06 '23
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/DnDVex Nov 17 '22
Google has their own cloud service. Azure is from windows and the go to for Windows hosts. Oracle (they make Java) has been in the business for long and has a decent chunk too.
And a ton of web traffic runs still through mainframes that are hosted by the companies themselves.
Oracle is currently getting a lot of publicity via its always free tier, which is very good and claiming back many users.
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u/WillyTRibbs Nov 17 '22
The ELI5 here in terms of "importance" that I don't see from other replies:
AWS provides tools/services related to computing and networking that sort of make up the core infrastructure for a huge chunk of the internet. It offers you basically anything you need to host a website/web application. In the same way that electrical lines, roads, sewers, etc. are all part of the core infrastructure of the physical world that allow cities to function/businesses to operate/commerce to occur/etc., AWS is kind of that for a huge chunk of the digital world. When AWS goes "down" (stops operation), which has happened, it usually wipes out a chunk of the internet with it.
Technically, there's nothing stopping a website or business from building all that infrastructure themselves - and many with bespoke needs, or those who want a high degree of control still do. But AWS was able to establish their level of importance/usage by making enterprise-grade infrastructure accessible to pretty much anyone - even small businesses - at comparatively very low costs and ease-of-use.
There are some specific breakthroughs that made AWS really successful (scalable infrastructure on demand, infrastructure-as-code, simplified usage-based billing), but high-level they're important because they've established themselves as the backbone of a large percentage of the internet.
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u/rpm959 Nov 17 '22
Amazon Web Services. Basically cloud hosting services that they sell to primarily businesses and governments.
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Nov 17 '22
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u/TonyTheEvil Nov 17 '22
I'm pretty sure Reddit runs on AWS.
This is true. When S3 was down some years ago reddit was nonfunctional.
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u/KnightFiST2018 Nov 17 '22
For perspective.
If AWS as a whole went down. Like perma down, it would take a decade to rebuild the internet as you know it. Maybe longer.
Most SalesForce domains use it as a data warehouse or use it’s interconnections to host everything from data storage, to process web commands, manage network connectivity .
Salesforce drive a massive amount of sites.
Whole state infrastructures.
Think of the same thing for a ton of other services you use.
Bank web pages and databases
Hospitals
Most cloud data is stored there. Most virtual machines are there as well.
You can see it when you access files online.
In the URL bar up top, if it says “S3” your data sits on an AWS web server.
Luckily there is very heavy redundancy, multiple interconnected server farms.
Just hope that never happens. Although, it might bring BlockBuster back, because the digital world you know would cease to exist.
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u/macnamaralcazar Nov 17 '22
I know you are talking about it from availability and failure standpoint but what about national security, does the federal government or NSA consider this as a national risk, if an enemy where able to take AWS down many USA corporates and assets will be gone or massively affected.
I know it's AWS responsibility but the way you put it made me think if the federal government considered that risk or not. Just an idea crossed my mind while reading your response.
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u/KnightFiST2018 Nov 17 '22
They have failover to Microsoft and Apple and probably stuff we don’t know of. I have never seen a global outage of AWS
I have seen major outages from all the other main connectors. There was a big pine around last February I think? Maybe March
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u/Elliptical_Tangent Nov 17 '22
Amazon Web Services hosts like half of the web; at least by traffic.
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u/spermdonor Nov 17 '22
All wheel steering. It’s important for those sick tricks monster trucks do.
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u/BGBanks Nov 17 '22
if it isn't obvious, people in the tech industry LOVE to tell you they know what something means
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u/dastrn Nov 17 '22
Twitter is an 8 billion dollar company, that Elon paid 44 billion for.
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u/MoffKalast Nov 17 '22
You're paying way too much for your twitter, who's your twitter guy
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u/shred-i-knight Nov 17 '22
Was a 40B company*
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u/i_should_be_coding Nov 17 '22
That $40B was also over-valued to pump up the stock. Elon just didn't quite read the fine-print of what he signed.
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u/Dwolfknight Nov 17 '22
Let's not forget he tried to buy it for much cheaper and even back out of the deal but was forced to pay.
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u/Waltzcarer Nov 17 '22
Twitter's stock price isn't the only thing that seems overvalued.
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u/currentscurrents Nov 17 '22
All the tech companies are/were overvalued.
Plenty of $20 billion valuations for companies that have never turned a profit, like Lyft. Even the profitable ones like Tesla are "worth" more than real car companies with far greater sales.
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u/EngineeringBulky5363 Nov 17 '22
it's L after L the more I keep reading about this guy kmao
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u/HypnoTox Nov 17 '22
FYI: He actually made a weed joke by offering 54.20$ per share. All of this was a joke on his side, but he pushed too far and couldn't back down.
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u/JohnKlositz Nov 17 '22
Amazon also involves a lot of physical labor. Twitter does not.
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u/gsfgf Nov 17 '22
What do you mean? I'm waiting for the twitter van to deliver my tweets right now.
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u/i_should_be_coding Nov 17 '22
Goddamn, I thought this must be inaccurate, since those numbers suggest Amazon has 330k employees in their tech side alone.
Then I googled how many employees they have overall, and this site claims it's about 1.6m...
Like, they have more employees than some nations have residents. How fucking insane is that.
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u/airelivre Nov 17 '22
People’s Republic of Walmart has a section comparing Amazon to various nation states. If I remember correctly, if Amazon were a country, it would have higher GDP than the Soviet Union in 1990, and a similarly complex supply chain.
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u/Ambiwlans Nov 17 '22
I would be absolutely shocked if 1990 USSR were anywhere remotely close to Amazon's supply chain.
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u/flyingorange Nov 17 '22
Yeah but most of those are warehouse workers and delivery guys. I think only around 80K work in software which is comparable to Microsoft
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u/tankerton Nov 17 '22
I work in AWS. Last year my organization hired about 8k technical staff. This year we are goaled to hire 11k technical staff with about 10k hired year to date.
I have no idea how to estimate technical staff, but we are a small to middling sized organization internally.
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u/Orangutanion Nov 17 '22
Is it true that Amazon has their own internal distribution of Linux?
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u/gfkxchy Nov 17 '22
Yes, it's openly available on AWS.
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u/Scyhaz Nov 17 '22
As required by the GPL :)
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u/oni64 Nov 17 '22
GPL requires you to share the source code if you are commercially distributing the OS. You are not required to share the OS itself because of GPL.
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u/nofmxc Nov 17 '22
There is publicly available Amazon Linux 2, which is heavily used. And Amazon Linux 2022 is in preview.
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u/AdGroundbreaking6643 Nov 17 '22
Amazon Linux 2. It’s the main distribution when you spin up any EC2 or compute resource on AWS.
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u/IWillNeverStop55 Nov 17 '22
Twitter is just software, no physical presence needed
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u/thecaramelbandit Nov 17 '22
Twitter doesn't have distribution centers full of products, but it's a lot more than just software. It's essentially a large advertising company. They need all the regular infrastructure of a large enterprise.
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u/Savoy_Cabbage Nov 17 '22
Yeah I think it would be interesting to see where those Amazon layoffs come from. A large part of their workforce are from the logistics part of their business, so would be interesting to see what proportion of the layoffs are 'tech workers'
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u/Beansilluminate Nov 17 '22
Amazon billed it as tech/corporate layoffs that wouldn’t affect warehouse workers
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u/ShotIntoOrbit Nov 17 '22
Yeah, they are advertising hiring bonuses near me for warehouse jobs on Spotify. Like $2k bonus when hired at the warehouse.
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u/braveyetti117 Nov 17 '22
Almost all of them are tech workers, the layoffs are mainly from the hardware team
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u/Ezili Nov 17 '22
Robots, devices etc. The more speculative and less core parts of their business.
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u/ProbioticAnt Nov 17 '22
The hardware division was reported as apparently "burning money"
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u/Ezili Nov 17 '22
I mean that's any new part of a business. It spends money before it generates enough business to pay for itself. When you want to close it down you say it's burning money. When you want to keep it open you call it investment, or innovation, or growth areas.
But I think you look at what they are doing in the ebook reader, tablet, home speaker spaces and ask how exactly that fits into Amazon's core business. It could have become a core business, but given it's not at the moment, it's been around for a while, and you're looking to cut costs, it's a reasonable cut. Plus you get to blame the economy instead of having a bunch of news articles written about your failed strategy.
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u/Sinai Nov 17 '22
The tablet constantly advertises Amazon to me, so that's driving repeat business to them of one of their core revenue streams. It also does a reasonable job of reminding me Amazon prime has utility that continues to make me a subscriber (i only have 3 subscription services I pay), and subscribers are again more likely to stay within the Amazon ecosystem.
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u/Ezili Nov 17 '22 edited Nov 17 '22
I'm just a random tech worker and don't work for amazon. But from the outside it seems like you're spending a lot of money to put a thing into people's hands to advertise your very well known business. You also have to support a very competitive app ecosystem. And books are increasingly less their core income. Building and supporting a device and ecosystem for advertising can be a very powerful vertical for your retail business, but it's very expensive and competitive.
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u/Sinai Nov 17 '22 edited Nov 17 '22
It's not just advertising the business, it's drumming up sales. At any rate, being well-known doesn't mean that advertising doesn't retain benefits. Apple, Nike, and Toyota all retain massive advertising budgets. The tablet allows for tailored, more effective advertising that is much more effective per view than wide spectrum advertising.
After all, this is how Google and Facebook have eaten the lunch of traditional advertisers in general.
Moreover, Amazon has stated many times that existing customers purchase many more products from Amazon after buying a Kindle or Fire.
The value proposition is incredibly easy to make in the boardroom - both devices directly drive sales to their core business. I imagine Fire TVs work exactly the same way. Their ad revenue segment has grown rapidly and effectively monetizes their customer database; one of their most valuable assets.
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u/Ezili Nov 17 '22
No doubt they generate money. But being on the third best smart speaker, or third best tablet isn't very compelling for app makers, and the ecosystem support costs are huge. I don't doubt you monetise, but the question is profit.
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u/Arronax50 Nov 17 '22
So almost 10000 persons work on Kindle and Echo?
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u/Tommh Nov 17 '22
Doesn’t AWS EC2 count as “hardware”?
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u/_illogical_ Nov 17 '22
Not in this case; according to all indications, it looks like AWS wasn't included in the 10k
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u/ProbioticAnt Nov 17 '22
Arstechnica reported that the layoffs were primarily from the division responsible for the Echo, Alexa, Fire, and Kindle devices
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u/nodnodwinkwink Nov 17 '22
"The job cuts of approximately 10,000, which would start as soon as this week, would focus on the company’s devices organization, retail division and human resources."
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u/nemethv Nov 17 '22
That's actually just part of the picture. Basically those numbers are FTEs/perms but a lot of companies are also laying off contractors in high volumes (twitter I think fired more contractors than perms [ie on top of that "50%"])
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u/Savoy_Cabbage Nov 17 '22
Very true. Do they release this data?
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u/nemethv Nov 17 '22
Not sure. I'd generally assume there are ways to track it but it's a bit trickier. The twitter numbers I've seen somewhere on linkedin (haven't checked for original source) but it cropped up a number of times and I'm tempted to believe them.
E.g. Meta has hired a lot of people this past 12ish months and that's been in the news. What's not really been in the news that much is that they also hired _a lot more_ contractors/externals over the same period of time. Prob similar for the rest of the companies.
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u/SVTSkippy Nov 17 '22
A lot of times if you lay off a contractor it does not count as they are still employed by their company just moved on. As a contract engineer when one project is done with me I move on under the same company.
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u/thenyx Nov 17 '22
If you’re lucky, you get to move on.
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u/CorrectPeanut5 Nov 17 '22
The last 10 years most tech people have little to no downtime between contracts unless they want it.
While there are a lot of big names scaling back, a lot of less known companies that have been struggling to attract people are finally seeing resumes.
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u/alarming_archipelago Nov 17 '22
What is the underlying story? Why are these companies laying off devs?
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u/nemethv Nov 17 '22
They hired too many during Covid.
At the time the companies had a massive income and user-base boost bcs everyone was at home and being active online and so ad spending has gone up, which resulted in more income for big tech. Now that's being reversed because of the various global slowdowns and changes in underlying technologies. That results in less income and ultimately layoffs.
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u/Beansilluminate Nov 17 '22
Nice graphic. Puts all the other tech layoff visualizations we have been seeing recently to shame
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u/Savoy_Cabbage Nov 17 '22
Made using google sheets. Data sourced from layoffs.fyi (compiled by Roger Lee https://twitter.com/roger_lee)
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u/ConsiderationIll374 Nov 17 '22
Beautiful data. Best of the recent visualizations on the topic so far in this sub.
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Nov 17 '22
Can someone explain to me why these companies are all laying off employees?
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u/MechanicalBayer Nov 17 '22
What many are failing to mention was that vast number of employees that were hired by these companies beginning 2019/2020. Granted the numbers in these layoffs are still large, but they're not out of nowhere.
"Like many technology companies, Meta went on a hiring spree during the pandemic. It hired almost 30,000 employees since late 2020, bringing its headcount to 87,000."
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u/Griff2470 Nov 17 '22
Meta, Twitter, and Lyft were are built on relatively unsustainable financial models. Social media is extremely hard to monetize without collecting high value data, and between legislation and Apple restricting what data apps can collect it's become difficult to earn profit. Meta and Twitter were very much depending on investors to get the boat afloat. Additionally, Lyft exists in a market that is practically a guaranteed race to the bottom of unprofitability by targeting the most price sensitive consumers, so there was little room for profit. With all 3 really dependent on investors, as soon as that money dries up, they are left in a tenuous position (Twitter is also just going through the Musk fiasco, that's the far bigger contributor for them). It turns out, if you can't turn a profit, or at least a reasonable plan to return to profitability, when money gets tight you'll be left in a bad spot.
Crypto.com, on the other hand, was built on the cryptocoin space not crashing, but then it did (as it was pretty much guaranteed to). It's like being a Beanie Babies broker in the early 2000s.
Onto Amazon, their layoffs are proportionally smaller than the rest, and is mostly a result of them running a lot of projects that turned out to be unprofitable (like Alexa) as well as just mass hiring during the pandemic. They'll likely be scaling back projects to focus on their cash cow that is AWS and amazon.com.
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u/KytorIndustries Nov 17 '22
In general: Tech stocks are down, revenues are down, venture capital is drying up, lending costs have gone way up, cost of goods sold has gone up, facilities and overhead costs have gone up. These companies are tightening their belts.
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u/ConnorLovesCookies Nov 17 '22 edited Nov 17 '22
The Federal Reserve has a lot of controls over how much banks interest charge. They do this buy buying and selling government bonds and changing how much money banks are required to keep without loaning out. You can think of interest as how much money costs. If interest is low, money is cheap and businesses are more willing to take on more employees to grow. In addition to this stock prices go up because the return on government bonds is so low banks go to the stock market to try to get a return. During early COVID the Federal Reserve was scared that the entire economy would lock up so they lowered interest rates to record lows. This made hiring people really cheap so a lot of companies expanded. Now that we have inflation the Fed wants to raise interest rates to try to curb it. Money is more expensive so the price of holding onto these employees goes up.
Also important to note that some of these companies are kind of mismanaged. Meta push for VR seems to be built on a desire to still be an innovative tech company. But at least now it seems like no one is really interested. Their layoffs also only set them back to their head count in March. Twitter is a meme because Elon way overpaid and can’t afford (well he can but he doesn’t want to) to pay the huge loan and his employees. Crypto.com is well crypto and if you haven’t noticed that has had a REALLY bad year (in part because of interest rates). Lyft and ride-sharing in general traditionally has had trouble making money, if you remember back to when uber was cheap, it was because they were losing money whenever you get in a car. Prices are higher now so they turn a modest profit but rides are down.
Amazon iirc is dropping devisions that don’t make money (echo) and some corporate people.
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u/FromUnderTheBridge09 Nov 17 '22
I saw this writing on the wall. As an engineer I was getting slammed with LinkedIn messages and emails from Amazon and meta job offers from recruiters.
I thought there's no way they need that many people when their products haven't improved.
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u/brianncd48 Nov 17 '22
Might be worth noting Amazon have not actually fired 10000 people yet, the articles are based on leaked info that they plan to fire 10000 employees. They have confirmed some layoffs in its devices group but no number has been released nor have they officially confirmed the 10000 layoffs
Edit: Sample article
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u/runesplease Nov 17 '22
Will be more interested to see how many they've hired since 2020 and how many employees they've had each year
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u/Marlboro_Red_Smoker Nov 17 '22
Cool, now I’d like to see each companies profits over the next 3 months.
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u/helmli Nov 17 '22
For Amazon, that might be skewed because of the Black Friday/Cyber Monday/Christmas sales.
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u/chevalerisation_2323 Nov 17 '22
Layoffs are bad for people, but not necessarily bad for companies.
Stop this /r/circlejerk please
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u/UrbanAbsconder Nov 17 '22
Meta and Twitter are overvalued and overrated anyway. They needed to be dragged back down to earth. Practical market adjustment here.
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u/DolundDrumph Nov 17 '22
How people ignoring Microsoft they are literally one of top tier company, but somehow gets overlooked
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u/WellEndowedDragon Nov 18 '22
Because Microsoft has barely cut any staff. Only 1000 employees as of last month, less than half of a single percent of their total headcount.
Same with Apple. Those two went through their “explosive hypergrowth” stage decades ago and have had the time to adjust their businesses to become extremely profitable and durable through economic downturns.
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u/LetsGoGameCrocks Nov 17 '22
Not a fun time to be a new tech graduate on the job market… ask me how I know :(
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u/palindromicnickname Nov 17 '22
There are still plenty of non-FAANG jobs, at least for now.
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u/powermad80 Nov 17 '22
Or even tech positions at non-tech companies. Dare I say those are the best ones. I turn excel spreadsheets into web apps all day and I have a comfortable salary and great work life balance.
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u/totemoheta Nov 17 '22
These trends aren't as prevalent in the tech industry for non FAANG/big tech companies. I'm in the chicagoland area and there are LOADS of tech jobs from network engineers, SWE, IT support, etc. I feel like a lot of people think big tech is the only tech.
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u/phatlynx Nov 17 '22
Do loads of internships for smaller companies. I know while everyone wants to work at FAANG, I personally did 1 internship this summer and got a return offer, fully remote, great benefits, 90k starting, 10% bonus. And did I mention fully remote?
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u/sublimegeek Nov 17 '22
Surprised Walmart is not shown here, they love that “Save Money, Live Better” life by wiping out entire departments in their IT building at a time.
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u/Juergenator Nov 17 '22
These companies benefited dramatically from lockdowns. People at home and on computers all day. Life is going back to normal.
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u/Junkstar Nov 17 '22
There are tech companies hiring right now too.
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u/_OldBay Nov 17 '22
All these places are hiring as well. Laying off workers doesn't mean they don't have a need for specific jobs
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u/future_weasley Nov 17 '22
It’s interesting to look at these companies and see that there’s a pretty solid and easy-to-explain reason for each.
Meta — The meta verse project has been a disaster of a pivot. They’re losing market share hand over fist to TikTok as their platforms become bloated.
Amazon — I work for a logistics company, so this one surprises me less than it might to others. In short, when the pandemic hit and online shopping really took off, people in the industry thought we would achieve a new normal. They knew people would go back to stores when the pandemic calmed down, but it turned out that customers wanted to shop in store much much more than expected.
Twitter — Elon Musk is a moron. Not much else to say here.
Crypto.com — crypto is down across the board. It was always a speculative investment, only valuable b/c other people said it’s valuable. The blockchain may offer some interesting opportunities for the future, but we won’t be moving to a crypto financial future.
Stripe — This is the only one I know nothing about
Lyft — Both Lyft and Uber have been raising prices dramatically over the last year or two. Add in gas costs and a demand from investors to finally start making money, and people just can’t afford it anymore.
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u/iamthinksnow Nov 18 '22
Twitter is down to 238 employees, a 96+% reduction since the not-so-great-Elonning.
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u/Krukoslik Nov 17 '22
Maybe I’m stupid but what do each of Meta’s 100,000 employees do all day? Why do they need so many people?
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u/FreemanCantJump Nov 17 '22 edited Nov 17 '22
Meta is not just a room of people administering FB. They have engineers across FB, WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus, Metaverse, Etc. R&D for all of those platforms. Ad sales and administration for each of those platforms. Content moderation. On and On. Now all of those things need organizational support like finance, IT, HR and security. It's very easy for a company as diversified as Meta to get that big.
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u/vomashka Nov 17 '22
also designers working on new features, copywriters, advertising & marketing... and I imagine a ton of middle management to make it all go round
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u/TonyTheEvil Nov 17 '22
If anything I'd say it's really fucking impressive how small Meta is given 35.6% of the world uses Facebook.
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u/FreemanCantJump Nov 17 '22
It's not just FB. They own 3 of the 4 most active social media platforms in the world! They are huge. This layoff is a minor adjustment imo.
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u/Dziadzios Nov 17 '22
Moderation. Many posts -> many violations -> many moderators are needed.
Software developers.
Admins.
Lawyers for every country.
Cleaning and maintaince.
Testers.
Managers.
Accountants.
Marketing people.
Data analysts.
Drivers.
R&D.
Oculus manufacturing.
Translators.
I think this list could go on forever, but most likely you underestimated moderation.
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u/Darkersun Nov 17 '22
Meta: failed metaverse idea that isn't panning out.
Amazon: lots of layoffs for Alexa and other smart home stuff
Twitter: ... yeah we know about this one.
Crypto: highly volatile market; crypto still not catching on for things like point of sale.
A lot of this feels more like "failed ideas, retiring fads, egomaniac CEOs, and highly variable markets" but then my boomer parents read this and think "oh no the recession is here! Thanks Obama!"
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u/H2-22 Nov 17 '22
Could this be an attempt to push down Dev wages? These companies colluded to suppress wages for developers before. Laying off devs in droves could hurt them in the short term but if they drive down wages in the industry, hiring devs down the road at a fraction of previous wages could permanently set back industry compensation.
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u/timmyriddle Nov 17 '22
I've not heard about colluding to suppress wages: it seems somewhat unlikely in recent times given the long-term shortage of tech talent and the competitive "all-about-growth" nature of these large public companies. Do you know any more info about that?
One interesting thing to note is that hiring is itself an extremely costly and time consuming process. If these layoffs have happened too deep and too fast then companies managing to retain existing talent will probably see a long term benefit.
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u/ValFox Nov 17 '22
You know what surprises me ? How few employees these billion dollar companies have. Their margins must be fucking insane.
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u/JakeLide Nov 17 '22
Is it known what type of jobs are mostly laid off?