Although the industry has seen tens of thousands of job layoffs, unemployment among tech workers is still low. Many businesses are in dire need of expertise.
General Situation
According to Layoffs.fyi, more than 118,000 employees have lost their employment overall in the IT sector this year. The amount of available positions in Big Tech that can accommodate workers who lose their jobs unexpectedly has decreased as a result of companies like Amazon and Apple slowing or stopping their hiring. Although many individuals now need to find new careers, the overall prognosis for computer employees is still positive. Their peers have reacted to recent layoffs with a wave of grassroots support to aid laid-off workers in finding new jobs. Their talents are still in demand.
The need for tech workers
Big Tech firms are merely one segment of the larger tech industry, despite the dominance of the headlines they demand. Even while they are doing so more slowly than formerly, and possibly for lower pay, many smaller businesses and businesses in related industries are nonetheless hiring tech workers. Some businesses are now swarming at the chance to recruit individuals who were previously monopolized by recruiters from the biggest businesses.
According to Julia Pollak, chief economist of ZipRecruiter, “These workers are at a huge advantage. There is still strong demand for tech talent in a wide range of industries, from government to retail to agriculture. Those industries for the past years have been left in the dust.” The forced exit of Big Tech is also creating fresh possibilities for entrepreneurs and investors looking to build the next big thing. For tech employees, there are two contrasting pathways, according to Pollak. “One group is taking a flight-to-safety approach and going to companies and industries that are recession-resistant. And another group will throw caution to the wind and take a big risk and start their own companies.”
The need for tech talent is still high overall. According to the Computing Technology Industry Association, the unemployment rate for ICT jobs in the US was 2.3 percent in August, which is much lower than the country’s overall unemployment rate of 3.7 percent – which is already low by historical standards. CompTIA statistics from earlier this year show that there are 8.7 million tech workers in the US.
The Layoffs and tech workers’s tradition
At least some of the recent layoffs are more a reaction to over-hiring by tech companies during the unanticipated boom they had during the Covid-19 outbreak than they are a sign of a significant change in the economy. The wider picture may not be all that comforting to those who have been laid off and are now rushing to find new employment before their work visas expire. However, after layoffs, tech workers have a tradition of coming together to support one another.
Nataliya Nedzhvetskaya, a graduate student at UC Berkeley studying sociology and labor activism, and a participant in Collective Action in Tech, an initiative to organize computer employees, claims that “There’s a precedent in this industry for sharing information [and] a culture that values transparency.” In this industry, exchanging information has been done before, and transparency is valued.
On LinkedIn, IT professionals have created groups just for those recently let go by Meta in an effort to lessen the pain of layoffs. They established a Google document with potential opportunities and distributed it. And they are boosting each other’s posts on LinkedIn and other social media sites to grow their audiences and attract hiring managers rather than those who are laying off workers.
