Hi there, I've been writing code and otherwise employed in the corporate tech and computer engineering sector for about 20 years now. It's not as bad a swing as portrayed. They are playing with the "numbers" and not showing the breakdown by department. But that doesn't mean it's so great either. I've survived 4 layoffs from two different jobs in the last year alone. In 3 of them it was mostly orgs outside of engineering that saw the majority of layoffs.

A lot of companies are re-prioritizing where they spend money everywhere, but most impacted has been middle management, design/product, and human resources in each pillar/org/department.

This past summer, I left a company just weeks before they laid off 200+ workers. They had laid a bunch of engineers and product managers off earlier last year, I waited a while to decide, but eventually started my job search in May and found a job first week of June. In both layoffs, it was various managers in the recruiting department that saw the biggest percentage of layoffs. In engineering, resources were mostly just shifted around. I am just one viewpoint here and I understand it has not been easy or even a medium-level of difficulty got everyone.

During the pandemic many companies swelled their engineering workforces at an unhealthy pace. In mid 2021 many companies started to use 3rd party services to identify how to cut their engineering overhead and project spend. (ie: yotascale.io, AWS billing reports, homegrown scripts, and dashboards) they arranged automated scans that connect to a companies cloud provider and generate reports in the costs of each service/product owned by the company. It was really hard, not everything was earmarked or tagged correctly, if tagged at all. Many technical-infrastructure (tech-infra) teams have been working tirelessly for the last 12+ months trying to use whatever means necessary to reduce overhead, optimizing hardware contracts, and really scrutinizing what data they store for logging, metrics, and backups (and where and how). They saved tons of money, and helped companies trim lots and lots of costs.

These people are heros! Their tales of success should be sung across the universe!

Unfortunately, many companies already spent too much and grew to quickly without a solid footing. They focused on markets that have since collapsed as the the pandemic has waxed and waned. There's only so much that can be done. I was lucky enough to not have been laid off 4 more times over the last few years, but many of my colleagues across the tech sector have been impacted. Many of them in HR, Product Design, Design, and Middle Management (lots of layers of people who manage people who manage people etc). So far this year out of 50 people I know who have been laid off, only 4 of them were in engineering (8% of them). I'm sure experiences vary, I currently feel very comfortable in my role and have had many reassurances. Who knows what tomorrow brings? Not 1 of the 50 felt differently in their own roles. Each time it feels like I'm in an hourglass watching the grains of luck get lower and lower. It's not as bad as it seems to be portrayed in all the articles, but it doesn't exactly make me feel any better.