[geodel]

As the article mentions European employees are mostly safe, in north America they have already cut 7000. So the upcoming layoffs will mostly be in Asia. I guess competition with Samsung/Huawei is brutal and it is losing market share.

[jamesblonde]

Ericsson are pumping money into the Valley to have a presence there - https://www.ericsson.com/thinkingahead/the-networked-society...

Engineers cost twice what they cost here in Stockholm. Then the Sponsorships in the Valley - Berkeley AmpLab. IMO, much of that is wasted. They want to build a halo effect, but are failing miserably. You can survive (and even thrive) outside the valley.

[eric_b]

We see this in the Midwestern part of the US too. I've worked at several large Midwestern companies who created a Silicon Valley presence so they could "innovate" or "disrupt", or whatever. None of those satellite offices have worked out, and were all a huge waste of money.

It turns out that unless you're one of the big tech giants, or a super cool startup, you will not be hiring the best in SV. And you'll be paying for the privilege.

Most of these companies are now learning that Midwest based employees are just as good as their SV counterparts, and cost a whole lot less.

[seanp2k2]

The other side to that is that people in tech who know they're good come to the Valley because they can get 2-5x the pay. It doesn't hurt that California is beautiful and has a lot of other nice qualities (weather, being the epicenter of the tech scene, close to the ocean and the mountains). Sure, it's true that we don't have a monopoly on good engineers, but for many, once they realize that they're undervalued in their current position (so, a "good deal" for companies), they might try to get a huge raise, get denied, then move to the valley. That's generally how it works, and it works pretty well. Despite the stupidly high cost of living and salaries, companies in the valley still manage to do alright. For employees, layoffs at one company aren't really a problem, since every other company is always hiring. It only becomes a problem when the whole sector is in trouble, which we haven't seen in a while. Hopefully things are diversified enough by now that e.g. AdTech failing wouldn't mean layoffs like the dot-com bust. Given how many areas rely on technology and the internet these days, I see another dot-com bust as decreasingly likely -- not that it couldn't happen, but I think it's more tied to the overall economy vs one sector in the corner. If biotech runs into trouble, VR/AR probably wouldn't be affected much. If payment tech gets disrupted, silicon design shouldn't dip much, etc etc.

[stouset]

Your first point rings extremely true from my own experience. It's of course the case that there are bright, talented, and experienced engineers in places other than the Bay Area, but it's hard to counter the brain drain that occurs. The best engineers who remain become comparatively rarer and so it becomes progressively more difficult to build a team of seasoned engineers as opposed to having a single veteran try and mentor six or seven inexperienced coworkers.

And in that scenario, you're extremely vulnerable to that senior employee getting burnt out from spending most of their time doing code reviews and putting out fires rather than building things themselves. You're also vulnerable to that person getting an enticing offer from a big-name company in the valley or an exciting-sounding startup in SF. Many of these opportunities are even remote, so this can happen even when your best employees don't have any desire to move.

So yeah, it's possible to find good talent in other locales. But there's a lot more competition for that talent, it's hard to build a critical mass of it when the best employees are constantly moving away, and there are a ton of challenges you have to deal with as a result.

[pm90]

As always, it depends. I do see your point, and no doubt there are companies that don't understand how the market in the Valley really works and are bound to lose money. But there are also companies that get it right. e.g. I used to work at Rackspace, which is headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, but they do have a (smaller) office in San Francisco as well. The people I worked with in that office were pretty damn smart (IMO, maybe my expectations are low).

Smart engineers evaluate opportunities based on hard facts rather than "oh cool its a cool startup with ping pong in the office!" etc. I don't know why this image is so common when so many of the smartest people I've worked with have not been swayed by it as much as objectively assessing the cold, hard facts as to: what they would be doing, who would they be working with, what sort of impact can they have, etc.

[georgeecollins]

As someone who has developed software in Palo Alto and in other places, I can testify to a mystique of the valley that some hold. It's true that you can get things done -- particularly scale a company and get investors -- more easily there then anywhere else in the world. And there are a lot of the world's greatest computer scientists there. But some people think that it is the only place, or a least the easiest place, that you can do really cutting edge engineering. That seems a little more dubious to me.

[NKosmatos]

I didn't see such statement in the original article from https://www.svd.se/nytt-omfattande-sparpaket-pa-gang-i-erics... On the contrary, it's stated that "...there are far-reaching plans to centralize several of the European markets to reduce costs by reducing the number of employees." The bad thing with companies of such a big size (IBM, Nokia, Siemens..) is that there is always a lot of people to layoff.

Ericsson has to find it's own way through these troubled and quickly changing times. There are many areas such as Virtual Network Functions, Internet of Things, Hyperscale Datacenter System and many others which are being heavily worked upon and I think will give some good results.

[geodel]

In general I feel the world today needs far less workers and particularly fewer workers with college degrees.

I can see in my own case 8 years back there were 12 people in team and now just 2. Slowly product got stable and people left for other opportunities and positions were filled for short time or never filled. But from business perspective this application is working just fine with few fixes here and there. There is no brand new next-gen replacement that would need scores of developers.

[jonas21]

I don't really see how the example of a product team going from 12 people to 2 supports the case that the world needs fewer workers.

Most products go through a cycle where you need a lot of people to develop them at first, then they stabilize and require fewer people, and the other people move on to different products.

You can't just look at one product or team in isolation -- as long as there are new products to be built, there will be a need for those workers.

[geodel]

I agree anecdote is not sufficient. I wanted to extend my experience as national or worldwide trend, may be that is not the case. But when I read increasingly frequent layoffs at all major IT vendors (IBM/HP/Oracle/Capgemini/Tata/Infosys/Cognizant and many more ) I tend to think it is general trend.

New products will be built always but with multilayered designs, more and more functionality is going in libraries/frameworks in lower layers. So a new product started today will not need as many developers. Again I am not arguing about the general quality of such product but new developments are using fewer developers than past.

[pm90]

So my view of the layoffs at the big "IT Vendors" is simply that the tasks which they originally hired workers for became increasingly automated or moved to systems that were less labor intensive.

A lot of the workers in India, for one example, worked on things you would hardly call programming. e.g. creating charts from data, manually moving data from db to db etc. These kinds of tasks should have (IMO) been automated in the first place, and should not require full time employees to handle them. As the automation become more mature, stable and well adopted, the bigger vendors start using them and don't require fleets of humans to manage them anymore. For a concrete example, I think ansible (and related tools) probably "destroyed" thousands of jobs as you didn't need to manage bash scripts manually etc.

There is another fleet of people who are hired simply for maintaining, developing on legacy systems, people you wouldn't find in the US. e.g. COBOL programmers.

[rpazyaquian]

I agree. Our need for more workers, both unskilled and skilled, is starting to plateau. We don't actually know how to deal with that[1], and people are starting to get antsy as opportunities become less and less common.

[1]Well, we do, but nothing that's implemented on a large scale yet.

[201708throw]

Cheaper mediocre developers can do the maintenance basically. The creative ones would get bored anyway - why keep them around.