Kevin Bourrillion, senior software engineer at Google, was recently laid off after serving the tech-giant for nineteen years. In late 2022, Parag Agarwal, then CEO of Twitter (now X) was laid off along with 6,000 employees. IT companies globally have been resorting to huge layoffs especially since the beginning of last year. As per Layoffs.fyi, a website that tracks layoffs, a total of 2,62,595 personnel were laid off by 1,189 companies during the year 2023.To cite a few, Google fired 12,000 of its workforce, Facebook 10,000, Amazon 20,000, Twitter 2,300 and Salesforce 8,000. And the spree doesn’t seem to stop. This year has so far witnessed 42,324 employees being fired by 168 tech companies while we are just in the first quarter of 2024.
It is not only the big leaders aka Facebook, Apple, Netflix and Google (popularly called FANG in the stock market) bearing the brunt, the layoff trend hasn’t even spared the Indian tech industry. A total of 19,921 layoffs were affected by the IT sector in India in 2023, while as this year has so far has seen 1,775 employees losing their jobs. A similar axe is also going to fall on the fresher engineering graduates as TCS, Infosys and Wipro, three leading companies, have announced to cut this year’s placements to a two-decade low figure.
In other words, total placements in 2024 are expected between 70,000 to 80,000, a 32% decrease from the previous year.This implies that a large number of pass outs from even the institutes of national importance like IITs would not find entry into the IT corporate sector. What has hit and where? Among the reasons, organizations have primarily been citing heir “restructuring plans that would enable to focus on core business areas”. Many also attribute the trend to over-hiring done during the pandemic and an anticipated economic slowdown.
A layoff herding effect, hilariously termed “copycat layoffs” by US academicians, is also being observed among the companies that somehow seem to be helping their stock prices. But what exactly is this “restructuring plan” through which the tech industry is justifying these unprecedented layoffs? A close examination indicates that layoffs began to drastically appearduring the ending quarter of 2022. Incidentally, it was in the November of 2022 that ChatGPT took the world by a storm.
It was soon followed by Google unveiling its Bard- now called Gemini, an evolution of its voice assistant (interestingly voice assistant is one of the areas where Google has cut down its employee count). Around the same period, Microsoft came up with Co-pilot. There seems a peculiar coincidence in the development of these AI technologies and the onset of employee layoffs. These technologies are obviously developed by teams of professionals working at the core of IT organizations. It can’t be ruled out that many such professionals would have been the brain behind a technology but now suddenly find themselves among the laid off population.
Is it absurd to imagine that people, like Bourrillion, pivotal in creating a technology are rendered jobless thanks to their own creation? Is AI fast replacing its very masters? Nobel Laureate Michael Spence recently said that AI can disrupt the role of software engineers. One of the by-products of technological revolution is joblessness, at least in the short term. In this case, however, it is taking its toll on those who worked hard to make it happen. Now looking as if they had been digging their own graves? This may well be one of the significant disruptions caused by AI.
(Author is Sr. Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science & Engineering (CSE), University of Kashmir, North Campus, Delina. Feedback: [email protected])
