Sony announced a ton of layoffs recently, at the same time they announced they will not be releasing any major titles until 2025. Don’t they need staff to make stuff? doesn’t every company? Why all the sudden layoffs, it just doesn’t make sense to me, what am I missing?
Capitalism. Welcome to the resistance, comrade.
Couple causes, and not just gaming. It is happening in most tech orgs.
During the pandemic most tech companies did large hiring sprees to bolster their IT staff to assist the remote workers and increased customer base as more were spending money on digital goods.
Now that the world is returning to normal, the amount that people are spending on digital goods has gone down so they are laying off people.
and on the flip side… restaurants, travel, and hospitality is desperate for workers due to the huge uptick in demand.
The answer is a lot of companies made dumb decisions during COVID-19. A lot of tech CEO’s saw a massive increase of profits during the COVID lockdown, and they decided there was no possible way for the gravy train to ever slow. The tech sector expanded way beyond its means, and now that COVID restrictions have inevitably ended and most everyone has returned to normal, their profit margins have shrunk back to normal. Since tech CEOs all have a brain parasite that compels them to increase growth always and forever, they have to now cut all those employees they hired during the pandemic to make the line go up.
You’ll notice that none of the tech CEOs are going to face any consequences for their pants-on-head stupid belief that they’d continue seeing the same revenue as when people were trapped in their homes, and the only ones who are going to suffer are all the employees who have now wasted ~3 years at these companies.
You are saying none and all, but look at Valve?
valve? the privately owned company not beholden to shareholders valve? that valve?
I’m not sure the CEOs actually thought growth would continue like that forever. They just knew they could get rid of all the extra people they hired when it slowed. The layoffs were always part of the plan, they just didn’t say that quiet part out loud back in 2020.
There is zero way these people didn’t know this would eventually happen. Anyone who was looking at this going on with a critical eye would have seen it coming from a mile away. Tons of more senior tech workers knew it would happen eventually. The market is especially rough for juniors right now.
You were all over it until you went cApiTisM BAD!
Yes, the tech sector went nuts and overstaffed. For reasons (see below). But now some people have to go.
Ever had a job at a big company where you’re doing very little, not accomplishing much? It’s miserable and scary.
We’re social animals. We do well in small groups, contributing. When you look around your team and no one’s doing shit, you get no sense of accomplishment and start asking each other, “Fuck are we doing here and when does the ax drop?” Morale tanks hard.
As to the suits being stupid, were you the CEO of Zoom, what would you have done at the beginning of the pandemic? Just said, “Fuck it. We’re riding this unprecedented event out! No idea the fucks going to happen, but we’ll tough it out with the staff we got!”
Then you would be bitching about overworked employees, miserable and unable to accomplish anything for the fire hose of work hitting them. Then you would bitch about how Zoom used to be great and really tanked during the pandemic.
I’m sure lemmy will come along and tell me how much more wisely they would have handled a century-event hitting a brand-new sector of the economy.
(And BTW, many of the people let go are walking off with a FAT new entry on their resumes. Tech jobs aren’t hard to find, even in slim times. Been there, done that.)
Its mostly just increased reporting. Tech companies overhired when when they were doing well during lockdowns and are laying people off now that the increased revenue didn’t hold indefinitely.
https://layoffs.fyi/ has been tracking layoffs in the tech sector since covid and the charts show how much more layoffs there were in 2023 (particularly January and February). It seems like the biggest change is that now every time there is a layoff it gets more news coverage.
Media wants us to believe we are in a recession so people stop spending and actually cause it, thus the Fed has to lower interest rates and the wealthy can go back to getting lots and lots of free money for virtually nothing.
It’s absurd to see a huge company dropping a few hundred jobs as a national headline… but that’s how hard the media is determined to pushing the recession narrative/bad economy narrative.
Salaries for tech workers went up due to supply and demand, and it started cutting into billionaire’s yacht money. So they fired a bunch of people (and used that money to increase executive compensation), which pushes salaries down, so in a year when they need to hire more people, they can hire at a lower rate, and then give themselves bonuses for being so smart.
Unionize.
This is the correct answer.
