Tech layoffs are coming hard and fast. And many people interested in keeping your blood pressure nice and high keep telling us that this is the result of a collapsing economy and that pretty soon everything will tank so hard that we’ll have to go back to the Abacus. Better get out that Pentium II slowly rotting in the closet and relearn how to use it until things go back to normal. And okay, perhaps without such hyperbole there is something to that, but they are perhaps not looking at the most important thing: We’re once again living in precedented times.
I’ll never miss an opportunity to show people that video. To the modern world the Pandemic was as alien as tweeting about it would’ve been for someone in 1918 or the concept of bacteria to someone in the middle ages, but it also meant that a lot of people had to adapt. And for many of them that meant working from home.
All of a sudden those nice little tiers of people needing only a fifth of their advertised bandwidth at home and focusing all of the top shelf hardware to select locations on their area of coverage were gone. And for people who had previously seen computers as those things that you need for work and Pinterest at home, it was time for an upgrade.
So came the spike in people buying computers, monitors, and whatever other furnishings they would need to create this most strange of inventions: the home office. Webcam shortages suddenly made the AliExpress models desirable (they really weren’t). For the lucky few whose employer has let them stay like these instead of going back to a now mostly meaningless paradigm, it should now be time to see about an upgrade.
Except for the fact that, for office work, unless they bought the $399 special at their closest electronics store, chances are their computer is now as capable of doing the job at hand as it was when they bought it. And if they are the sort of people who work on an industry that could benefit from the latest and greatest, chances are they already did upgrade.
However, that’s a small percentage of the market. And that sudden influx of demand from when the world ended has more or less dried out by now. Naturally, in response to this, companies are going to be forced to set their expectations lower. Surprisingly, they all seem to have been concocted on the assumption that everyone will suddenly and inexplicably need to buy a new computer again.
And so we look at the giant round of tech layoffs. The situation is dire even without counting Twitter, which seems to be intent in becoming a case study for someone, but they aren’t exactly sure who. HP is laying off 6,000 people, Salesforce is looking to dump 2500 jobs. Amazon is giving the gift of unemployment to about 10,000 people. It would take someone more anal-retentive than me to check how many of those were hires from when they thought that markets can grow infinitely. But that’s rather academic when you have thousands whose Christmas will be punctuated by job hunting.
