The following excerpt is from this Seattle Times article written by Paul Roberts.
The string of layoff announcements by Amazon and other Seattle-area tech employers has many asking whether the tech industry is bound for a major correction and even more job cuts in coming months.
In fact, that correction may already be underway.
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All told, Washington looks set to lose as many as 18,000 tech or tech-related jobs over barely two months. That’s more than the state lost in the dot-com bust of 2001-03, when many overvalued online startups collapsed and thousands of workers found themselves without jobs.
Those historical comparisons come with important caveats.
Today’s losses are coming in a tech sector that is much larger. The 18,000-job decline would represent less than 4% of the current tech workforce. Losses in dot-com bust represented around 10.5% of the sector workforce.
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Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on Thursday that layoffs will continue into 2023, meaning some may have to wait months to know if their jobs are safe.
The temptation to use historical trends to “figure out what the future is going to look like … misses the mark quite a bit because this is something completely different,” Vance-Sherman said.
One major unknown: whether the Seattle-area can absorb all the laid-off workers, or whether some may need to switch to other industries or other locations.
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Nadir Khan, a former AWS employee, said the offers he’s received are all out of state, and are all for less than he was making at Amazon.
“If you’re being paid a lot at a big tech company and … you do get laid off, it’s very likely you’re going to be making less money,” Khan said.
Read the full article.
