Laid-off technicians struggle to find jobs, with layoffs at their highest level since 2001 | Wilnesh News

Allison Croisant, a data scientist with about a decade of technical experience, was laid off Paypal Earlier this year, she joined the ranks of unemployed people across the industry. Croisant uses one word to describe the current job search process: “crazy.”

“Everyone else was laid off, too,” said Crossant, who lives in Omaha, Nebraska, where she works remotely for PayPal.

Her emotions are reflected in the numbers.Since the beginning of this year, more than 200 companies have laid off more than 50,000 people According to tracking sites, technology companies Layoffs are for reference only. This is a continuation of the theme from 2023, when 260,000 employees at nearly 1,200 technology companies lost their jobs.

letter, Amazon, Yuan and Microsoft They all participated in layoffs this year. eBay, unified software, sap and Cisco. Wall Street cheered the cost cuts, with many technology stocks hitting record highs on optimism that spending discipline coupled with efficiency gains from artificial intelligence will lead to rising profits. PayPal announced in January that it would lay off 9% of its workforce, approximately 2,500 jobs.

For tens of thousands of people in Crossant’s situation, the road to reemployment is arduous.All told, 2023 is the second-largest year for layoffs in the tech industry’s history, behind only the dot-com bubble burst in 2001 Employment consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Not since the tragic closures of Pets.com, eToys, and Webvan have so many tech workers lost their jobs in such a short period of time.

Last month’s layoffs were the highest for any February since 2009, when the financial crisis forced companies into cash hoarding mode.

CNBC spoke with a dozen people who have been laid off from the tech industry in the past year or so about their experiences in the labor market. Some spoke on the condition that CNBC not publish their names or write about the details of their situations. Taken together, they paint a picture of an increasingly competitive market, where job listings include strict qualification requirements and pay is lower than in previous jobs.

This is a particularly confusing situation for software developers and data scientists who just a few years ago had some of the most marketable and valuable skills in the world and are now considering whether they need to quit the industry to find work.

“The market is not what it used to be,” Roger Lee, founder of Layoffs.fyi, said in an email. “Many salespeople and recruiters are leaving the tech industry entirely to secure new positions. Even engineers are making compromises—accepting positions with less stability, tougher working conditions, and lower pay and benefits.”

Li said wages for tech workers have “basically stagnated” over the past two years, citing data from comprehensive.ioa compensation tracker he recently helped launch.

Crossant’s job search has involved applying for positions that have attracted hundreds of applicants. She can view this data using LinkedIn’s Talent Insights platform, which shows how many people are vying for open positions.

Additionally, some listings require applicants to have advanced degrees or professional experience in machine learning and artificial intelligence, a new development in Croisant’s experience in the job market.

Croisant said that during the five-week job search, she applied for 48 positions and received two interviews. She ultimately chose to accept a lower-level data analyst position and take a contract position at a fintech company starting next month, taking about $3,000 less in base salary.

“It was an absolutely terrifying experience for me, and I’m not sure I can ever truly feel safe at work again,” Crossant said. “But in the end I’m still one of the lucky ones. Some of my friends have been looking for months and still haven’t found anything.”

‘It’s humbling’

Krysten Powers was fired from travel tech startup Flyr in January after two years at the company. Navigating the current labor market is like a full-time job, she said, “and sometimes even harder.”

“You send out your resume and you get rejected almost immediately,” said Powers, who has worked in marketing for a decade. “It really takes a toll on your confidence and you get this imposter syndrome.”

Powers lives in the small town of Natchez, Mississippi, with her husband and two children. A month before she lost her job, her family bought a new house. Powers said moving was not an option and she was only considering a remote role in marketing. However, she is willing to take a pay cut.

“It’s really humbling,” she said.

The same dynamic is playing out across the industry, even among former employees. GoogleIt has long been considered the home of Silicon Valley’s elite.

Christopher Fong, who worked at Google from 2006 to 2015, is the founder of Xoogler.co, an organization dedicated to helping people laid off by the internet company. The nine-year-old organization is made up of thousands of Google alumni and current employees and provides peer support and hundreds of in-person events.

In January, Google cut hundreds of positions across its hardware, central engineering and Google Assistant teams. A year ago, the company cut 12,000 jobs, or about 6% of its full-time workforce.

Fang said that for many former Google employees, the “biggest challenge” today is finding a job that can maintain previous salary levels.

Michael Kascsak, who was fired from Google last March, took a different approach to his job search.

Kascsak said he welcomed the pay cut he took when he started his job as head of talent acquisition at veterinary business CityVet in January after applying for hundreds of positions. He acknowledged that his former employer set very high salary expectations.

“When I came into this industry, I knew I was lucky to work for one of the highest-paying companies, and I was a realist. I was prepared to be flexible,” said the former Austin, Texas-based Looking for talent at Google. “I’m happy with my current salary because I want to be with good people.”

The tech sector is a notable anomaly in a labor market that has been largely stable over the past two years. Nationally, the unemployment rate rose to 3.9% in February from 3.7% in the previous three months. Since the beginning of 2022, it has basically been within this range. The U.S. economy added 275,000 new jobs in February, the third consecutive month of more than 200,000 jobs.

Sentiment indicators were mixed. Job review website Glassdoor’s Employee Confidence Index measures employees’ views on their employer’s six-month business prospects. hit rock bottom The data appeared in February for the first time since sentiment data was first released in 2016. Among tech workers, discussions about layoffs on Glassdoor have more than quadrupled in the past two years, rising 12% last month compared with the same time last year.

However, ZipRecruiter’s job seeker confidence index has been rising since mid-2023 and rose to the highest level in the nation Season 4 From the second quarter of 2022.

Even within the tech sector, there is a huge divide in the market right now. Layoffs.fyi’s Lee said that while layoffs continue elsewhere, AI is driving “a return to rapid hiring and expansion.” According to Integrated.io statistics, the salary of artificial intelligence engineers increased by 12% from the third quarter to the fourth quarter of last year, and the average salary of high-level artificial intelligence engineers nationwide exceeded US$190,000.

Amit Mittal has worked on both sides of the job market – previously as a hiring manager and now as a job seeker.

Mittal was fired from AI lending company in November upstartThere, he worked as a software engineering manager and frequently supervised interviews. Mittal said he has seen the recruitment process become “more difficult” as layoffs proliferate.

“We’re under more pressure to raise the bar higher and higher,” he said. “People who used to have four years of experience would have had a good chance of getting a good job. But now they’re competing with people who have four years of experience. People with six, seven, eight years of experience are competing for the same positions.”

Mittal, who is originally from India and has lived in the Chicago area since 2007, has been feeling a different kind of pressure lately.Under his H-1B visa, Mittal Just 60 days away from officially ending his job, he found a new job in the tech industry to stay in the country.

“If I have to pay my bills for four months by driving an Uber or flipping burgers at McDonald’s, that’s fine,” he said. “But that mechanism doesn’t exist for me.”

Mittal has now successfully applied for a separate B-2 tourist visa, which gives him an additional six months to find a new job. It’s not a cheap endeavor, though. He estimates he spent about $8,000 in legal and administrative fees related to his submissions.

Mittal said he has applied for about 110 positions but has been unsuccessful. He blamed the lack of success on employers’ unwillingness or inability to sponsor visa holders.

“Even though I see hundreds of posts every day, it seems very unlikely at the moment,” Mittal said.

Bill Vezey was fired from eBay in January after 13 years as a software engineer at eBay. He said he was learning the rules of a “new game” and they were much different than what he remembered.

“Achievability is not just a numbers game,” said Vezey, 64, who lives in Santa Cruz, California. “It depends on how well you brand yourself and your chances of landing any given position through networking — the hidden job market.”

Wiese said he hopes to be rehired by his long-term employer and hopes to remain in the technology industry.

“Despite everything that 60-plus years of life has brought me, I am a hopeless optimist,” he said.

Like many people interviewed by CNBC, Powers said she spent a lot of time customizing her resume Find open positions, scan online job boards and apply for newly posted positions. She networked by contacting recruiters or hiring managers associated with each position, though she said some recruiters contacted her quickly after expressing interest.

She attended several interviews and turned down a job offer. The position required her to work in an office and her salary was reduced by more than 50% from her previous job. She also had to find daycare.

“There was a sense of impending doom,” Powers said. “At some point, the money runs out and the options become very bleak.”

Still, Powers said she’s trying to stay positive “because giving up is not going to get me a job.”

—CNBC’s Jennifer Elias contributed to this report.

watch: Why mass layoffs in tech are happening despite a strong economy