[hn_throwaway_99]

It's #3 - it's always #3.

All of these tech companies (with perhaps the notable exception of Apple) massively overhired during the pandemic, and that overhiring was on top of a decade+ of the ZIRP era. So there are 2 main drivers of these layoffs:

1. Correcting pandemic overhiring

2. In the ~2010-2022 timeframe, tech companies poured all this money into speculative bets that never went anywhere, at least from a profit perspective (think Amazon's Alexa devices division, Google Stadia, and perhaps most famously the Metaverse itself). All those diversions are now toast, and they employed a ton of people. The only speculative bet that is now "allowed" is AI, which is one reason why I giggle whenever I hear people trying to defend their companies or projects by adding "AI" somewhere in the name.

So perhaps my second point is similar to your #2, but I think the important difference is that the end of the ZIRP era would have caused companies to kill these inherently unprofitable projects even if AI never came on the scene.

[ninjagoo]

> here are 2 main drivers of these layoffs:

> 1. Correcting pandemic overhiring

> 2. In the ~2010-2022 timeframe, tech companies poured all this money into speculative bets

Any data/sources on which this might be based? The pandemic was 6 years ago; do these "Agile" (the tech term) companies really carry many unproductive lines-of-business for so long?

> speculative bets that never went anywhere ... think Amazon's Alexa devices division, Google Stadia, and perhaps most famously the Metaverse itself

Organizations make speculative bets all the time. Is there an accounting of the profitability of Alexa/Nest etc.?

> end of the ZIRP era would have caused companies to kill these inherently unprofitable projects

if you plug in the years 2020-2026 in the Fed Rate - Unemployment chart here at [1], it shows that from 2020 - 2022, rates were near zero while unemployment spiked during Covid and then fell. From 2022 through 2023, rates rose sharply while unemployment stayed relatively low. 2024-2025 the labor market softened. You can add the Federal Funds Effective Rate and the Unemployment Rate easily through the menu.

Unemployment stayed low through the rise in rates for almost two years prior to 2024. Given that companies operate on a quarterly reporting basis and program/project decisions are at least on that cadence, I don't think that the line you're suggesting that Rates-Go-Up -> Projects-Get-Killed -> Layoffs-Increase quite lines up with the economy-wide data in this exceptional case of 2022-2023.

We may have to look elsewhere for the reasons behind the current labor market weakness ... cough..*economy*..*trade walls*..cough...*structural re-alignment* [2]...cough...

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1duFv

[2] 6% employment decline in 22-25 year old workers https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/app/uploads/2025/11/Cana...

[malfist]

How many hall passes do CEOs get for pandemic over hiring? Its been four years, and four years of layoffs and hiring to go back to layoffs. Pandemic over hiring might explain the first layoff or two a year or so later, but not the tenth or so layoff nearly half a decade later.

[coredog64]

It's the principal/agent problem: The overhiring is incredibly difficult to unwind because it led to the creation of empires. Everyone who is not a founder has more incentive to keep the empire because it props up their comp.

[shermantanktop]

I see this firsthand. Execs who are openly hostile to and distrusting of their own middle management.

These were supposed to be farsighted geniuses who took credit for their stock performance. But they made the most obvious blunder: opening a Pandora’s box that they can’t close.

[malfist]

How?

In 2022, Meta laid off 11,000 (13%)

In 2023, Meta did two layoffs, one of 10,000 (another 13.6%), one of 600

In 2024, Meta did a layoff (layoffs.fyi doesn't list the number)

In 2025, Meta did three layoffs, one of 3,600 (5%), 100 and 600 people

In 2026, Meta has done two layoffs, one of 200, and one of 8,000 (10%).

If you can't correct overhiring in 4 years as a CEO, you've failed. If you repeatedly have to do >10% layoffs every year for 4 years you've failed (if it's to correct for a one time hiring spree).

Meta's employment didn't skyrocket during the pandemic making this argument even more bullshit. Between 2012 and 2018 Meta averaged an employee count growth of 40% YoY. In 2020, they grew by 31%, 2021 22% and 20% in 2022. Meta slowed their growth during the pandemic.

This "pandemic overhiring" is bullshit.

[shamoo]

In 2012 meta had 4600 employees.

In 2018, 35,500.

From 2019 to 2022, 44k to 86k.

2026, as of now, 70k, 26k higher than 2019.

Using relative comparison is not appropriate for a software company, which is incredibly scalable by nature. Yoy is not the appropriate metric here. These are not workers on the line in a widget factory.

[burningChrome]

Just to play devils advocate here - but from 2022-2026 did they ever have any large hiring cycles that would replace some or most of these layoffs? Or should I believe none of the layoffs in the last four years have been replaced at all?

I do agree with your point about overhiring, its been way to long and this continues to be an excuse without any real evidence to back it up.

[nradov]

Whether it's bullshit or not, does that even matter? Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has majority voting rights. This is not a secret. Everyone who considers working for or investing in Meta is aware that hiring and firing decisions are subject to his whims.

[kdheiwns]

Seems more and more like CEOs and MBAs as a whole are letting AI make all their decisions

[hdndjsbbs]

> Any data/sources on which this might be based? The pandemic was 6 years ago; do these "Agile" (the tech term) companies really carry many unproductive lines-of-business for so long?

Do big tech companies like FB and Google even pretend to be "agile" anymore? I think they mostly sell themselves on institutional stability and monopolist market positions rather than speed of execution

[TeMPOraL]

Did they ever pretend, and anyone ever believed that? "Agile" organization is even more of a bullshit concept than "Agile" in the team.

Excepting for trivial-size, freshly formed startups, companies cannot be "Agile", because finance and legal and HR and even marketing have constrains setting the tempo - you cannot just drive them with a sprint as if it was a clock signal.

[ninjagoo]

> "Agile" organization is even more of a bullshit concept than "Agile" in the team.

> Excepting for trivial-size, freshly formed startups, companies cannot be "Agile", because finance and legal and HR and even marketing have constrains setting the tempo - you cannot just drive them with a sprint as if it was a clock signal.

Implementations of Agile at different companies can be an issue, yes. But that is to be expected in any large organization, simply because of scale. It doesn't change the fact that the on-the-ground teams at agile orgs work to a different cadence and approach than historically traditionally structured companies.

There are a few different ways to manage interfacing with parts of the org that need to march to a different beat. That always creates friction, and has to be managed properly. Any large org can suffer from hubris, middling management skills and capacity, wasted effort. Problems of scale, I guess.

[nradov]

Enterprise methodologies like Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) are explicitly designed around managing that friction. Developers may complain about the additional toil and process overhead it imposes on them, but for the organization as a whole this is sometimes the least bad option.

[dbish]

None of the important projects or FANGs build with frameworks like that, sorry. Project management frameworks are all larp and mostly used by slow moving firms from the past.

[liquidpele]

Yes, they do. In fact, they have several competing committees to market the concepts internally through armies of PMs and TPMs and KPIs and efficiency metrics tracking. Also your AI token use of course.

[StilesCrisis]

I was in two different Google orgs and neither one used any sort of agile methodology at all, and in fact I almost never heard agile even discussed. Some teams arranged their bugs "kanban"-style but that was up to the individual team; it wasn't a company-wide decision.

[ninjagoo]

> Do big tech companies like FB and Google even pretend to be "agile" anymore?

Folks from those companies will have to speak up, but my understanding is that yes, internally these large tech orgs use the Agile Methodology, as opposed to the 'traditional' 'Waterfall' development methods.

[trgn]

agreed. zirp has become a meme, it does not really explain any current dynamics.

[sulam]

Stadia was a minor footnote compared to Android, Pixel, and the other large organizations at Google. But there was plenty of hiring there during the pandemic, so your broader point is not wrong.

[mghackerlady]

the only thing I miss about stadia was the controller. Man, that was a nice controller. Also, playing games on a nest hub was a neat party trick

[konschubert]

> In the ~2010-2022 timeframe, tech companies poured all this money into speculative bets that never went anywhere

I think it is hard to overstate the effect that Waymo will have.

[oblio]

1. If it scales worldwide. There's a decent chance that considering current global geopolitics, China will never allow them in, India and the EU will probably do the same or favor local competitors, Africa/Latin America will probably not have the money to tier 1 markets, which kind of leaves the US + Anglosphere.

2. If it captures most of the transportation market. That's debatable because self-driving tech works even better for trains, trams, subways, buses, etc. And that's before we go into other self-driving car companies.

3. If it becomes truly production ready within the next 10 years or so. By "truly production ready" I mean a Uber/taxi competitor in at least 20 alpha global cities outside of the US. Otherwise yeah, it's going to be a great tech but with a 30+ years ROI.

[konschubert]

I didn’t say that Waymo will be a commercial success or that there won’t be copycats more successful.

But waymo created the category by showing it is possible.

[basisword]

Re: pandemic overhiring - haven't most of the big tech companies already corrected for that? Starting in 2022 we've seen very large rounds of layoffs multiple times a year. That's 3-4 years of layoffs now. Meta alone has laid off over 30k people since 2022, not to mention closing many open roles.

[givemeethekeys]

Where did all the extra employees come from? Did this result in shortages in other industries that the employees supposedly transitioned from?

[hn_throwaway_99]

These West Coast tech companies had some of the highest salaries on the planet, so yes, they took employees from other locales/areas.

But also, while there have been layoffs in engineering teams, Ive seen a lot of "support staff" get absolutely obliterated. Things like "agile coaches", "technical project managers", UX testers, marketing roles, etc. etc. While I've seen most of my laid off soft engineer friends find new jobs relatively quickly, I've seen lots of folks in these other roles suffer long bouts of unemployment, and often leave tech entirely. It's these folks I feel the most for. A lot of them were making low 6 figures 10-15 years ago, and now many of them have no hope of making that much in their careers again because companies have vastly reduced the number of those roles.

[AbbeFaria]

My experience working at Big tech companies is that people with roles like “agile coaches", "technical project managers", UX testers add questionable value. And the QA is usually outsourced to service companies like MindTree, TCS etc anyway.

Lot of these companies are bloated from having way too many Engineers anyway. Once you have mature software that brings in bagfuls of money, you don’t need that many people to keep the ship steady. I have seen this first hand at MSFT, we started a new team back in 2019 and it probably had ~40 people full time across US and India. By 2024 when I left, we had about 20 people in India who could easily run the service, the US team was dissolved and they moved to other teams in MSFT. The fact was that new features were few and the team was in KTLO mode. I have seen the reverse happen too, the team I was working on was dissolved and we were moved to different teams and everything moved to the US last year, managers were converted to ICs and a few folks were probably fired but it was a ~10 year old service that didn’t need that many people to run, even more so after AI tools became big last year.

[mschuster91]

> My experience working at Big tech companies is that people with roles like “agile coaches", "technical project managers", UX testers add questionable value.

"Agile" can go and die in a hellfire for all I care.

But good technical project managers aka "bridges between the higher-up beancounters and the workers" are worth their weight in gold.

[AbbeFaria]

At MSFT, Product Managers were Technical Program Managers. Yes, a good PM is a joy to work with.

[joe_mamba]

>But good technical project managers aka "bridges between the higher-up beancounters and the workers" are worth their weight in gold.

Yeah but it's not easy do distinguish those from the snake oil salesmen who are just good at smooth talking during the interviews.

[vishalontheline]

Pretty easy. Get them to talk about a project they've managed and start poking holes. Who was on the team? How did they organize meetings? What were the bottlenecks? How well did everyone get along? What did they do to help grease the gears? Did they have to change the process? How did they like the software? Which software did they use? Did they have to administer it themselves? How did they deal with management changes / team changes / tons of support requests / issues in production? Where did they draw the line between PM work and engineering work?

[Schlagbohrer]

What do you think about Cory Doctorow's theory that the AI produced code is going to come back to bite companies due to tech debt / unmaintainability?

I am skeptical of Doctorow's theory because it looks like LLMs will continue to improve enough over the near term to be able to handle issues caused by AI-written code from the past few years.

[3form]

I've heard OpenClaw got over 600k lines of code vibed over 80 days.

I have this theory that the bloat will follow to the full extent possible. OpenClaw has this, the OpenEye or whatever that comes on another day, with better models, will have 3 million lines of code. All of the possibilities that you mention will not come to fruition the way you'd like to, because speed is preferred over building better things, and to hell with maintainability.

Eventually these things will become a ton of black boxes, and the only option will be to write them from scratch with another next gen LLM. Lots of costly busywork, and it will all take time.

[sharadov]

Tech debt and maintainability were important because time was of the essence in another era. If the cycles get compressed by say 95%, to hell with it, just trash the old and write everything from scratch, start from a clean slate each time?

[oblio]

Claude Code is similar. It's fairly clean for AI coding standards but it's also most likely much, much bigger than what it should be for what it does.

[AbbeFaria]

In the mature service I worked on, adding new code was “templatized”, you had to add feature flags, logs etc which didn’t vary much no matter which feature it was. The business logic was also not that complex, I can see AI tools one-shotting that and it indeed is a productivity boost. You would be surprised to know that most work was exactly this, writing rather mundane code. Majority of the time was spent coordinating with “stakeholders” (actually more like gate keepers) and testing code (our testing infrastructure was laborious). This was at MSFT. There are lot of teams that are innovating at the frontier (mine wasn’t, at-least not technically), I don’t know how AI tools work in those situations.

[byzantinegene]

the near term is not an issue, because most ai code is still reviewed by experienced engineers with experience. the problem comes in the future where junior engineers who never acquired enough experience to handle engineering problems

[lazide]

Ain’t nobody reviewing the majority of vibe coded output.

[johnvanommen]

> A lot of them were making low 6 figures 10-15 years ago, and now many of them have no hope of making that much in their careers again because companies have vastly reduced the number of those roles.

I moved to the Seattle area during the dotcom boom.

Within 18 months I was unemployed.

There was DEFINITELY a feeling, like the whole “internet” thing might have been a bubble. I helped a friend move to Pleasanton CA and there were so many empty office buildings, it looked like a zombie movie.

But it all came back, and more.

[hn_throwaway_99]

I'm not at all saying that tech is somehow "dead". What I am saying is that many of the non-engineering roles that were popular in tech over the past 15-20 years are either going away or will continue with vastly reduced numbers of people. If you're someone who did agile training for the past 15 years and are now in your 40s and were laid off, I sincerely doubt you'll be able to get a job as an agile coach before the end of your career that pays as much as in the 2015-2020ish timespan.

[oblio]

The number of tech employees worldwide in 2026 is probably 2x or more compared to 2001. Maybe even 3x. Things are not the same.

[red-iron-pine]

also add in that the single largest source of tech growth in the last 3 years has been building tools that will obliterate the need for tech employees.

replacing SRE-4s with AI is the point

[hnfong]

IIRC, CS majors in universities grew a lot over the past 2 decades in particularly past couple years.

It can be argued that the demand for graduates in other industries might have stagnated or even dropped, and it's "spread over" many different industries, so it's not really that seriously felt.

But if you were hiring in the software industry during the covid peak years, you would seriously feel the shortage. I used to interview candidates in a FAANG, and at some point it was more likely than not that a candidate that we liked and prepared to make an offer would tell us they already accepted an offer from another FAANG...

[nradov]

There was never any shortage. Your company wasn't good at recruiting, or moved too slowly, or had a bad reputation, or was making low offers.

[smm11]

You guys weren't very good, then.

[steveBK123]

My observation is mag7 got less picky in hiring.

Post-2015 and accelerated during Covid, many east coast techies I knew that didn’t go to the right school, get a 4.0 and take the “right path” suddenly started popping up on my LinkedIn ad having joined a mag7.

And then everyone else lower on the food chain got even less picky.

And then we had the whole PM / DS / etc new job path fads that pulled in non-CS and sometimes non-STEM people who did a bootcamp.

[michaelt]

Pulled from other technical fields, leading to them having an ageing workforce and struggling against far-eastern competitors.

If an engineering graduate has a chance to make $0.8X at a US company that makes hobby drones, $0.9X at a US company that develops 3D printers, $1X at a US carmaker that's struggling to develop a good EV, or $1.5X at a US adtech company - you can imagine where they end up.

[baxtr]

Other industries and other countries. Until recently, other industries were struggling very hard to find developers for example.

[ValentineC]

> Amazon's Alexa devices division

Alexa devices had so much potential, if they'd only practised customer obsession like Amazon used to (still?) preach, and not stuff their products with ads.

[hn_throwaway_99]

How? Potential as cool devices, sure. Potential to make money though?? Nobody has really figured out how to make money from voice-only assistants.

[52-6F-62]

But do you really think they accidentally over-hired to the tune of tens of thousands of individuals? Across these companies the numbers are close to 100,000 people. Maybe much more.

That means that a large number of high ranking people in these companies projected they would need these people in the coming years, and then some.

I think it may be darker than that, and the overhiring was a tentative measure to build up a charge, like electrons in a capacitor, to release a shock to the market that would achieve two aims:

    1) drive salaries down through fear and contest

    2) reduce the bargaining power of employees (software engineers were starting to look to unionizing in the past 5 years especially and that has gone deathly quiet even though working conditions have worsened and demands have increased on 'ICs')

It's rudimentary electronics physics. Such physics is regularly applied to economic systems modelling to achieve predictable outcomes (usually making more money).

Any objection as to whether these companies executive teams were collaborating should be seen as very empty by now, given we know they are all deeply circularly invested in each other and thus are bound to each other's success or failure.

[ptdorf]

Keeping your employees on their toes can work in the short term.

On the long term, prolonged stress kills innovation and engagement.

[canes123456]

It’s weird though because they could just cut the whole metaverse and it would matter exponentially more for profits and Wall Street. Maybe that is what this layoff is but I doubt it. They already laid off 10% of reality labs this year. Why do that if they were going to kill it completely.

There also no financial reason to lay off people. The revenue and profit for employee is already way better than per 2020 levels.

I suspect it really is to pour more money into AI capex.

[compounding_it]

> notable exception of Apple

I don’t think Apple is an exception. I think they have also over hired but they are also scaling, albeit slower than they used to. The scaling elsewhere is not happening, especially meta where they are trying to extract money from every corner they can find out of desperation, and so the books need to become lighter.

For Apple, hiring more than they need can be soaked into the books because their sales and profits keep increasing, though the rate of growth has slowed. However, if it’s an expense that can be avoided, then it’s an expense that should be avoided.