"Between the depths of the pandemic in the spring of 2020 and peak employment at the start of 2023, the tech sector added around 1m workers."

Mind if you summarize the article, namely where have all the laid-off workers gone? It’s behind a paywall.

https://archive.is/UopZ0

> For years unsexy industries like industrial goods have struggled to compete with the tech industry for talent. Now they are pouncing. John Deere, an American tractor-maker, has been snapping up fired tech workers to help it make smarter farm machinery…Carmakers, increasingly focused on software, are also hungry for technologists. So are banks, health insurers and retailers.

Well that’s where the article answered my question, and it’s not anything I haven’t already heard

John Deere seemed to be aggressively recruiting when I was on the market

I guess the important takeaway for me was that even tho' the current rounds of layoffs are very high-profile -- Big Tech letting go tens of thousands of workers -- the reality is that the tech sector has still grown substantially in the last three years. And with tech getting into more and more industries, of course workers from Big Tech have options in previously non-tech-focused industries that now desperately need software developers. TL;DR: the media likes to paint it as doom and gloom but things are booming really...

This is good to know. I know someone whose employer said there will be 3 rounds of layoffs this year, leading up to the fall and they’re wondering if they should be looking, just in case.

Consolidation may have changed the scale of the numbers. There are only about 6 tech companies now and each one of them is bigger than Texas.

@U0HG4EHMH I think the point is that "tech" is not just a few giant software companies. There are many industrial and service companies that need software in their products and they develop within the company.

@U03K7Q0EF8D I read @U0HG4EHMH’s comment as agreeing with my point, to be honest: the "Big Tech" companies are disproportionately large and so 10% of their workforce seems like a huge number but when you look at the overall growth of IT across all industries, it's "small fry" really -- IT as a whole is growing, but IT within some anomalously-large tech companies has had an adjustment... even tho', overall, they too have growth in the past 3-5 years.

As software gets into more and more products, the market for developers continues to increase overall. I do wonder when it will cool off... software is eating the world so it will probably be a while before we really have to worry about a lack of jobs. Right now, we're not training people fast enough to fill the pipeline...

I see, that makes sense. I guess I was thrown by "only about 6 tech companies now". From the employee's perspective, "tech industry" is about the work we perform and the number of such jobs, not the business sector of the employer.

Yeah, the mainstream seems to "worship" a very small number of very high-profile tech companies these days, and treat them as a bellwether for IT in the large which is unfortunate.

Not just the “mainstream” but also quite a few within the tech industry, who view them as the best way for high salaries and career progression

My other main reaction to this is "I don't miss programming in Scala one bit"

Ah, the wonderful power of strongly statically typed PLs