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Alison Croissant, a data scientist with nearly 10 years of experience in the technology field, has been fired. PayPal Earlier this year, she joined the ranks of the mass unemployed across the industry. Croissant has one word to describe her current job search process: insane.
“Everyone else has been laid off, too,” said Croissant, who lives in Omaha, Nebraska. She was working remotely for PayPal.
Her feelings are reflected in the numbers. Since the beginning of this year, more than 50,000 people have been laid off from a workforce of more than 200 people. Tech companies according to tracking websites layoff.fyi. This is a continuation of a major theme in 2023, when more than 260,000 employees at approximately 1,200 technology companies lost their jobs.
alphabet, Amazon, meta and microsoft Everyone is participating in downsizing this year. eBay, unity software, SAP and Cisco. Wall Street has largely supported cost-cutting, driving many tech stocks to record highs on optimism that spending discipline and efficiency gains from artificial intelligence will lead to higher profits. PayPal announced in January that it would cut 9% of its workforce, or about 2,500 people.
For tens of thousands of people in Croissant’s position, the road to re-employment is difficult. Overall, 2023 will be the second-biggest year of cuts in technology on record, after the 2001 dot-com crash. Outplacement support company Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Not since the spectacular debacles of Pets.com, eToys, and Webvan have so many tech workers lost their jobs in such a short period of time.
Last month’s number of layoffs was the highest in February since 2009, when the financial crisis sent companies into cash conservation mode.
CNBC spoke to more than a dozen people who have been laid off from technology jobs in the past year or so about their experiences in the labor market. Some spoke on the condition that CNBC not use their names or write about the details of their situations. Taken together, these paint a picture of an increasingly competitive market with job postings that include strict qualification requirements and pay less than previous jobs.
This is a particularly perplexing situation for software developers and data scientists, who just a few years ago had some of the most marketable and highly valued skills on the planet; I am considering whether I need to leave the industry to find a job.
“The market is not what it used to be,” Roger Lee, founder of Layoffs.fyi, said in an email. “To secure new positions, many salespeople and recruiters are leaving the technology industry entirely. I am accepting a welfare job.”
Lee said salaries for engineers have been “nearly stagnant” over the past two years, citing the following data: general.ioa rewards tracker he recently helped launch.
Croissant’s job search required him to apply for several positions with hundreds of applicants. She was able to see that data using her Talent Insights platform on LinkedIn, which shows how many people are competing for open positions.
Additionally, some listings required applicants to have advanced degrees or professional experience in machine learning and artificial intelligence, which was a new development in Croissant’s experience in the job market.
Croissant said she applied for 48 jobs and passed two interviews during her five-week job search. She ultimately opted to take on her contract role at a financial technology company starting next month, accepting a lower-level data analyst role and a reduction in base salary of about $3,000. .
“This was an absolutely terrifying experience for me. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel safe going to work again,” Croissant said. “But in the end I’m still one of the lucky ones. I have friends who have been looking for months and still haven’t found anything.”
“It’s humiliating.”
Kristen Powers was fired in January after two years in marketing at travel technology startup Flyer. Navigating her current labor market is similar to her full-time job, “and in some cases it’s even more difficult,” she said.
“You submit your resume and you get rejected almost immediately,” said Powers, who has worked in marketing for 10 years. “It does a lot of damage to your self-confidence and you get this kind of impostor syndrome.”
Ms. Powers lives with her husband and two children in the small town of Natchez, Mississippi. Her family purchased a new home one month before she lost her job. Moving isn’t an option for Powers, and she said she’s only considering a remote role in the marketing department. However, she is willing to accept a pay cut.
“It’s definitely humbling,” she said.
May 15, 2023, Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, USA.
Teyfan Coskun | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
The same dynamics are happening across the industry, even among former employees. Googlelong considered the home of Silicon Valley’s elite talent.
Christopher Fong, who worked at Google from 2006 to 2015, is the founder of a group called Xoogler.co that seeks to provide support to people who have been laid off from internet companies. The nine-year-old organization is comprised of thousands of Google alumni and current staff, providing 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.
Fong said the “biggest challenge” for many former Google employees now is finding work that maintains their previous salary levels.
Michael Kaskusak, who was fired from Google last March, took a different approach to his job search.
Mr Kaskusak said he welcomed the pay cut that led him to take up the role of head of talent acquisition at veterinary business CityVet in January, after applying for hundreds of jobs. He admitted that his previous employer had set very high compensation expectations.
“I took this job thinking I was lucky to work for a company that paid in the top percentile,” said Kaskusak, who lives in Austin, Texas. “I’m a realist. I was prepared to be flexible. ” he said. Google’s talent sourcing. “My current salary is OK because I want to be in an environment with great people.”
In a labor market that has remained largely stable for the past two years, the tech industry is a notable outlier. The national unemployment rate rose to 3.9% in February from 3.7% in each of the previous three months. It has been roughly within this range since early 2022. The U.S. economy added 275,000 jobs in February, the third straight month above 200,000.
The market for AI engineers is rapidly growing
Sentiment indicators are mixed. Job posting site Glassdoor’s Employee Confidence Index measures how employees feel about their employer’s six-month performance outlook. fell to the lowest level Among tech workers, discussions about layoffs on Glassdoor have more than quadrupled in the past two years, with a 12% increase last month compared to a year ago.
However, ZipRecruiter’s Job Seeker Confidence Index has been on the rise since mid-2023, rising to its highest level in 2023. 4th quarter From the second quarter of 2022 onwards.
Even within technology, there is a huge chasm in the current market. Layoffs.fyi’s Lee said AI is driving a “return to rapid hiring and expansion” even as layoffs continue elsewhere. According to Comprehensive.io, salaries for AI engineers increased by 12% from the third quarter to the fourth quarter of last year, and the average salary for senior AI engineers nationwide is more than $190,000.
Amit Mittal fired from AI financing company Upstart
Amit Mittal
Amit Mittal has been involved in both sides of the job market, previously as a hiring manager and currently as a job seeker.
In November, Mittal was fired from the AI lending company. upstartThere he worked as a software engineering manager and often supervised interviews. Mittal has seen the hiring process become “much more rigorous” as layoffs spike, he said.
“There was a lot of pressure to basically raise the bar higher and higher,” he said. “In the past, someone with four years of experience would have had a pretty good chance of getting a good job. But now they’re competing with people who have six, seven, eight years of experience for the same position.”
Mittal, who is originally from India and has lived in the Chicago area since 2007, is under a very different kind of pressure these days. Mittal is under an H-1B visa. Just 60 days after officially ending his employment, he found a new job in the technology industry to remain in the country.
“If I have to pay my bills by driving an Uber or flipping burgers at McDonald’s for four months, that’s fine,” he says. “But that mechanism doesn’t exist for me.”
Mittal has now successfully applied for another B-2 tourist visa, giving him another six months to find a new job. But it wasn’t a cheap endeavor. He estimates he spent about $8,000 in legal and administrative costs associated with filing.
During that time, Mittal said he applied for around 110 jobs to no avail. He attributed the lack of success to employers’ reluctance or inability to sponsor visa holders.
“Despite seeing hundreds of posts every day, that seems pretty unlikely at the moment,” Mittal said.
Bill Vezey was fired by eBay in January after 13 years as a software engineer at the online retailer. He said he was learning the rules of a “new game,” but the rules were much different than he remembered.
“Achievability is not just a numbers game,” said Vesey, 64, who lives in Santa Cruz, California. “It’s a combination of how well you brand yourself and whether or not you have access to certain positions, the hidden job market, through your network.”
Vezey said he hopes to be rehired by his longtime employer and wants to remain in the technology industry.
“Despite what 60-odd years of life has brought me, I am in some ways a hopeless optimist,” he said.
Like many people interviewed by CNBC, Powers said she spends her days building her resume. Find job openings, explore online job sites, and apply for newly posted positions. She builds her network by reaching out to recruiters and hiring managers relevant to each role, but some recruiters brush her off as soon as she shows interest. It is said that
She had several interviews but turned down one offer. Taking her that position would have required her to work in an office while taking a more than 50% cut in her salary from her previous job. And she would have to find a daycare center.
“There’s a sense of impending doom,” Powers said. “There’s a point where the money runs out and your options get really tough.”
Still, Powers said she’s trying to remain optimistic because “you won’t get a job if you give up.”
CNBC’s Jennifer Elias contributed to this report.
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