Companies such as Microsoft, META and Salesforce have recently cut their employees to increase efficiency and profits. Estimates of around 250 thousand employees in the tech industry have been laid off since the start of 2021. The data from Indeed shows a reduction of more than half in the software development job postings compared to the same time a year ago. This changing trend can be seen with the companies experiencing a rapid growth followed by a successful decrease in headcount.
As per a note from Morgan Stanley led by Brian Nowak, AI technology could be taking over the workforce in the coming times. AI-assisted coding tools can make the engineers much more efficient and don’t need much work. Additionally, the AI-based sales tools can minimize the need for huge sales armies. This means that the jobs lost won’t come back or will come back much more slowly and the tech jobs in future may not even exist. The first signs of this trend could be seen with the memo from Urs Hoelzle, engineering head of Alphabet, Google, who plans to use automation to reduce the need of site-reliability engineers to software engineers and reduce their numbers.
Similarly, META has had a wide-spread recruitment freeze since the past six months and the focus has been on more efficiency with the hiring. In this changing landscape, the tech employees and software engineers were thought of as a group which is least affected by automation and the trend can change this in future.
Regarding the company mentioned in this article:
Meta is a San Francisco based data company that enables enterprises to analyze their data from multiple sources. It was founded in 2014, since then the company has raised $128.5 million and went public in 2020. It recently posted better-than-expected earnings and cut jobs to increase profits.
Urs Holzle is the 8th employee at Google and the Senior Vice President of Technical Infrastructure at Alphabet and Google. He is instrumental in inventing and implementing several technology strategies for Alphabet and Google. He has also initiated several efficiency-driven changes that were implemented upon.
