Kettle It has been a bad week for thousands of tech workers this week, with multiple corporations announcing that headcount reduction will continue for the time being.
Around 50 percent of Bandcamp were let go by Epic ahead of the site’s sale to Songtradr, Stack Overflow cut headcount by 28%, and LinkedIn showed around 700 people – largely engineers – the door despite Microsoft making very healthy profits. Meanwhile, Nokia slashed its worker numbers by 14,000 after profits slumped and Qualcomm let 1,000 people go last week.
As long as there have been jobs there have been layoffs. While the problem will always be with us the last few years have seen these rounds of redundancies increase in size and frequency.
So, as a timely topic and one close to readers’ hearts, in this week’s Kettle we ask why the layoffs keep happening. Is it post-COVID belt tightening, corporate greed, the demands of Wall Street, or even AI coming to take over certain job types? You can see Register journalists who cover these stories in the discussion below.
We have a fresh audio-only version available here (and hereafter), feel free to subscribe or via your podcast host of choice.
From clockwise from the top left in the thumbnail, we have journos Brandon Vigliarolo, Tobias Mann, Jessica Hardcastle, and Iain Thomson. The Kettle producer is Nicole Hemsoth Prickett. ®
