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Brian: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Microsoft, Salesforce, Google's parent company Alphabet, Meta, Facebook's parent company, Amazon. You know what I'm talking about already, right? Massive multibillion-dollar companies and yet all these companies have announced in recent days, weeks, or months that they are trimming staff. Microsoft announced that it will cut 10,000 jobs, 5% of the total workforce. Alphabet, 12,000 6%, another 6% from Spotify yesterday.

Across the industry, these cuts have come after pandemic years, which saw many of these companies go on hiring sprees. One estimate from the trade association CompTIA puts the number of new tech jobs added in 2022 alone at $260,000. That was the number of jobs added. What's going on in the tech industry? Here's one dimension we want to explore a little more that you may not have heard as much elsewhere as Tripp Mickle, tech reporter for The New York Times, writes, "Recent job cuts have been an awakening for a generation of workers who have never experienced a cyclical crash." Well, guess what? Tripp Mickle joins me now, tech reporter for The New York Times. Hi, Tripp. Thanks for doing this. Welcome to WNYC.

Tripp: Hi, thanks for having me.

Brian: Right away, listeners, we'll open up the phones to hear from you. If you are home today because you got that Google layoff notice in your email inbox last Thursday, give us a call. If you've been laid off from a tech job from anywhere in the last few weeks or months or days, help us report this story. Older tech workers, what advice do you have for your younger colleagues who've never been let go? Or anything you want to say or ask about what's going on in the tech industry right now and the future of work?

For those of you who've gone through all that training to become software engineers and things like that, or those of you who are not the engineers, but other employees of those massive companies. 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692, come on in, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Twitter still works. Tripp, what's going on in the tech industry right now? What kind of fiscal pressures do these companies all have in common?

Tripp: We're going through a phase of whiplash. Essentially, what happened was when the pandemic began, tech went through probably one of its biggest boom times in years. It was already in the middle of this long period of expansion, but what happened was everybody stayed home and so people binged Netflix, people were ordering Amazon more than they had in the past. They were searching for local stores that were providing curbside pickup on Google. Every tech company was benefiting from this surge in demand, and to keep pace with it, they accelerated hiring.

During that time period, many of these companies nearly doubled their staff. We're talking about tens of thousands of workers were hired into these tech companies in a two-year span, a clip at which we hadn't seen since before the dot-com bust. What happened when people opened their doors and reemerged over the last year and a half is that demand has weakened and some of these companies that were experiencing this tremendous period of growth, they've seen that growth sputter in stall, and they're responding by cutting staff.

Brian: Have these job cuts been in some ways contagious? In the last few weeks, there have been so many announcements of layoffs at different companies, even when those companies, Microsoft, for example, are also announcing multibillion-dollar gambles on new or emerging technologies like AI, and also they're all in different businesses, right? Facebook doesn't do what Google does, et cetera.

Tripp: Oh, you're hitting in terms of the different businesses. One of the things that has allowed these companies to become so prominent and large is the fact that they each have their own lane that they dominate. For Google, it's search, for Facebook, it's social media. For Apple, it's smartphones. Microsoft is still a leader in enterprise software, and that's what's made these companies so strong and so profitable.

To your question about what's happening, yes, these companies are continuing to make plenty of money, but there is some contagion here. There's an opportunity to call staff to eliminate jobs and reduce their workforce, save some costs, and they can do it without consequence, in part because so many of them are doing it at the same time. The negativity of making a large number of layoffs is not as high as it would be if they were doing it in and of themselves.

Brian: Let's get into what you called in your article in The New York Times text generational divide. Layoffs have touched workers across generations, of course, some just a few years out of college, and some who've been in their jobs for decades. Can you talk about that generational divide between a young worker and how they may be experiencing this and the older veteran tech worker?

Tripp: Yes, of course. This article really started with just like, hey, let's unpack the numbers, and let's look at how deep this pullback is based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data compared to what's happened all the way back to the 1990s in terms of downturns of tech. What emerged really quickly in looking at that was just how severe the fallout was during the dot-com bust. We're talking about something on the order of 25% of the jobs were eliminated in a span of four years. When I saw that relative to what we saw last year--

Brian: That was the period around 2000, right?

Tripp: Yes, exactly. What I saw in looking at that relative to what we saw last year was actually on aggregate last year, the job numbers in tech increased. Even though we had all these headlines about layoffs, the larger story within the tech industry it was still growing and adding jobs. I just thought that contrast was really interesting, and I wanted to go back and talk to some people who'd gone through that steep pullback in the dot-com bust and get their perspective on this.

In the first couple of people I called, some of them recalled being laid off twice in a span of six months, being out of work for months at a time. It was a very different experience that they went through, and their attitude about what's going on right now was like, this is nothing. I just thought that juxtaposition was interesting and asked them if they were kind of conveying that to their colleagues, and they said, "Yes, what we went through then made us a bit salty about what we're seeing now," and it was really interesting. I talked to a gentleman named Brian William who was laid off. He's 48. He was laid off in Seattle, Washington from a job at Coinbase where he was a software engineer.

He said that because he'd been laid off from Atari in 2003, during the dot-com bust, he developed a routine every year where he would do a gut check and say, "Okay, if I'm laid off this year, what's my plan? Do I have enough money in the bank? What am I going to do?" That A, it kind of gave him a bit of a shield so that when this layoff happened it didn't catch him by surprise, and then, B, he did already have a plan, and his plan was to take the severance that he received and funnel it into a business that he hoped to start himself, and he started a career coaching business for other software engineers, and that's something he'd been dreaming about for years.

He was pretty swift-footed in doing that, and when you contrast that with millennials and gen Z workers who came into tech during this decade-long period of expansion, you have to understand when something on the order of 25% of the jobs was eliminated, it wasn't until 2021 that the tech sector fully recovered all those jobs that were lost in the early 2000s. This whole past decade, every single person who came into the world of tech did so watching these companies become increasingly profitable, resilient, and savvy at selling not just a job, but a lifestyle.

You had buses that were shuttling people to work. You have masseuses on campus. You have your meals taken care of. You have pour-over coffee on demand, laundry service. It's a lifestyle. It's not just a job, and so a lot of these younger workers who came into this period of techs growth believed that these companies were resilient and impervious to a pullback. When they got those pink slips at 04:00 AM when they tried to log into their computer, most of them were stunned and shocked, and that's the contrast. The grizzled veteran who was anticipating or at least prepared for a cut, and the relative newcomer who just hasn't seen layoffs like this really in their career.

Brian: All right. Laid-off tech workers or people who know and love laid-off tech workers. How are you experiencing this recent layoff? What do you want to say about what you can learn from your older brothers and sisters in the industry, or from what New York Times tech reporter, Tripp Mickle is saying right here, and what are you going to do? 212-433 WNYC 212-433-9692, or tweet @Brianlehrer and we'll start with Kay in Brockport. You're on WNYC. Hi, Kay.

Kay: Hey, how are you? Thank you so much for taking my call, longtime listener. Thank you so much for taking a hold of this topic. My sister is an engineer, she has a double Master's in electrical engineering and has an MBA and my husband is a cloud architect. The lifestyle point that you made in when you have these highly desired skills in this country, and you have these amazing skills, you get this great job. I'm finding, and my sister is finding that startups, particularly who got lots of money last year and at the end of the quarter, into the last quarter had to really start burning that money down.

My sister and my husband were brought into projects and did really well. Did these really what's called the [unintelligible 00:11:29]. This big goal type objective for developing and creating these amazing innovations till the end of the year, at the beginning of this year, they started to get notices that say, "Sorry but our funding might not be there. Would you please if you're going to continue working for us, accept half your salary." He literally 50% of what we could expect and some of these tech companies as your expert knows, pay monthly, and that means that you're going to just get half of what you normally would get. Granted, I appreciate that both of them are still employed but changing what you expect and your lifestyle the most.

Brian: Did they lose half their salaries?

Kay: Absolutely. Now here's the blessing in the curse, the blessing is that they're still employed, the blessing is that they still clearly have skills, and they're marketable. Now, of course, with the [unintelligible 00:12:32] of all of these wonderful new people in our tech sector that are now unemployed, there's less competition, but still, yes, as long as funding comes in.

Brian: I hear you Kay. Thank you. I'm going to leave it there. That's an interesting story Tripp and one wrinkle in it that I hadn't heard before. I think software engineer salaries are famously high, I think, because of sheer supply and demand. There were a lot more jobs, needing people with coding skills and things like that than there were people with those skills, people who had had these really strong STEM education, especially computer science type educations, and so salaries have become really high.

There's a story of rather than just laying people off, as we've heard from the biggest companies, they've been cutting salaries. Is that something you're seeing across the board more than I realize?

Tripp: That's the first time I've heard of salary cuts, quite like that. What you are seeing in startup land, which is where she was describing her husband, and [unintelligible 00:13:46] is that because the Federal Reserve has increased interest rates, venture funds have tightened up their lending, and basically told startups to do the same. There's a real trickle-down effect. As a result, there have been startups who are among the first to begin layoffs and that started in the first half of last year. Then the wave built and spilled into the bigger companies that we've been talking about more recently.

That I guess effort to achieve some fiscal discipline so that you don't have to fundraise because fundraising is really, really tough right now, in the venture world, is something that's still going on. For example, there are companies that I know of that have tried to get their burn rate on an annual basis down by millions and millions of dollars, so that they can live a little bit longer and survive longer on the cash that they raise before things began to tighten up.

Brian: Let's take another call. Here's Michael in California, New Jersey, you're on WNYC. Hi, Michael.

Michael: Hey, Brian, how are you? Thanks for taking my call. My situation is, I guess a little bit different in that I didn't really specifically work for a tech firm, although I worked for a large telecom, that likes to see itself as a tech firm. I'm a lead CX designer, and I was notified at the end of October, that as of December 30th, the end of December, my job will be eliminated.

I had a little bit of a warning, so to speak and my supervisors were really great, and they were like, "Look, just do what you got to do. Find your next chapter in your career." I spent a few weeks doing the normal things or reworking my resume, updating that, building an online portfolio. I have to say, I was really surprised at the job market because I'm 57 and in the course of my career I've been working for 27 years in the design field. I've been laid off about four times in 27 years, I went through the dot-com burst I was laid off during then.

I was working in an advertising agency during the Great Recession, I was laid off then. That was really difficult because everybody was getting laid off in the design of creative field. There was very stiff competition for finding new jobs and it actually took me about 14 months to find a new position. I freelanced during that time, did other things but this time around, I have to say as soon as I had my portfolio ready, and my resume ready to send out and actually started applying, I was really amazed at how many positions were open for people like myself who do what I do.

At times, I was getting four and five responses a day applying to open positions and the good news is I start my new position this coming Monday. I looked for about a month and in that month, I had about, I think 15 interviews. I had second interviews and some third interviews. I was getting down the process. As you have more interviews with a company you start out with the HR person, then you go to a hiring manager, and then you start getting interviewed by maybe several team members.

I had a little bit of a different experience but I'm just also think like, not everybody who works for a tech firm specifically is getting laid off. I think the telecom I worked for whose name begins with V, they had laid a large internal design group and that was a part of the consumer marketing organization. They just decided to have a round of layoffs as well. I think it's affecting other companies as well but maybe we're just not hearing about it as much.

Brian: Mike, that's really, I think, important for context for everybody. Thank you. Congratulations on your new job. You'll have to listen to us on the podcast rather than live starting next week. I think Michael, puts at least two other questions on the table Tripp. If you're just joining us, folks, we're talking to Tripp Mickle, tech reporter for The New York Times on all these tens of thousands of layoffs, in the major tech companies, just in the last few days and weeks.

One is there's a theory out there already, I think that the tech sector is overcorrecting now and that there is still a huge future in computer programming, or call the field whatever you want, because it's still the future in so many ways. Another that you've written about is that there is a talent shift in the tech industry. I think Michael was touching on that too, that most tech jobs are now in industries like healthcare, and banking, not necessarily for what we think of as tech firms. You want to reflect on either of those things?

Tripp: Yes, two things. I think Michael's experience speaks to what's happening behind the noise and when you get past the noise and headlines. Spotify lays off 6,000 people yesterday and Microsoft, it was 10,000 people last week, that gets a lot of attention. What is being missed in all of that is the fact that there's still plenty of jobs out. ZipRecruiter did a survey late last year and talked to a lot of people who had been laid off with tech experience, tech jobs, and most of them, something on the order of 80% of them reported finding a new job within three months.

Anecdotally, I've found that to be true. Michael's experience speaks to that. There are plenty of jobs out there, and that's why for people who went through that dot-com burst who are a little bit more seasoned and are like Michael, they've gone through four layoffs. This period of layoffs feels very different than the previous ones because the labor market is still very tight. How long it'll stay tight I think is something we'll all be keeping an eye on, but that's good news for those who are being laid off right now. Then the other thing that you point out, Brian, is that if you're Walmart, if you're JP Morgan, if you're the federal government, which has 2,500 open jobs for people with tech-related skills that you haven't been able to fill either, because people look at those jobs and say, "Well, that's not as sexy as working for Google. Or, that doesn't pay as well as working for Facebook." This is a great time to be in the market trying to hire people.

Brian: That's so interesting. This relates to something that we've talked on the show about for years being a New York show. That is that New York has become the second biggest tech job center in the country next to Silicon Valley. Tell me if you disagree with that on the numbers, but a lot of the reason is that there are so many tech employee needs in New York's preexisting big industries, finance and advertising, and media and things like that.

Tripp: Yes, no, absolutely. When we start to tick all of that stuff off and then you spill over into the really strong advertising industry there. Certainly, there's a [unintelligible 00:21:18] of jobs and that's why we've seen universities like NYU and Columbia scramble to try to create more robust tech programs and computer science programs within the schools so that they can satisfy those demands.

Brian: Max in Jersey City, you're on WNYC. Hi, max.

Max: Hey, how are you, Brian? Yes, I was part of the recent things going on at Twitter. I was fortunate enough to not get laid off, but I ended up taking the severance package from them. I'm now looking on the job market again. To me, it was very interesting to see the background of when I started there. I'm in my mid-40s and experienced when things were a little bit leaner and I was there for almost a decade and seeing how much the perks, the lunch every day, the things your guest was talking about.

I was immediately like, this doesn't seem like this gravy train can last forever. Kept my head out of the clouds, that this is just the way things are going to be. I started to fall into that later on and was like this is just the way things are and it's great. I think the lesson learned here was if things seem too good and that they can't last forever, as they keep looking around for jobs that these stratospheric gains just can't last forever. Now I'm taking some time off to reflect, looking at smaller companies, looking at different industries outside of Google, Twitter, Facebook.

I think the gravy train of free lunches and massages and all this stuff it's easy to fall for that after a while. I'm thinking this is just the way things are going to be forever, but reflecting upon it now, it's like, yes, how can this possibly last forever? I feel stupid for thinking, "Hey, this is the way things are going to be forever and now I'm coming back to earth." I think it's a good thing in some ways to tighten your belt and realize that this was completely unrealistic.

Brian: That's sobering reality check, Max. It sounds like you've got your feet planted firmly on the ground, so good luck whatever you do next, and thank you very much for that call. Tripp, here's a tweet that's coming in listener writes, "I don't suppose Brian is going to point out how these layoffs expose the lies of the big tech employers trying to get more and more cheap H-1B foreign labor. When the boom comes back, will the tech industry hire back these now 40 and 50-year-olds, or go whining to Congress that H-1B limits need to be raised again because they can't find qualified Americans?" What about that context?

Tripp: It's a totally valid point. I guess we'll have to wait and see how tech firms handle that. They've certainly laid off people who have H-1B visas and those people have been put in more of a predicament than American colleagues who can take their time finding a job. They obviously have a certain number of days that they need to find a new job to maintain their visa. I don't have a full answer for that. [laughs] I fully expect that while the commoner is a bit cynical that probably these tech firms will be back in DC asking for more H-1B visas at a certain point in time.

Brian: Maybe cynical for good reason. Another listener on Twitter asks, "Are tech jobs being replaced by AI?"

Tripp: Not yet. Although we are at a fascinating inflection point with AI and just its ability to write code can change and transform what tech companies need from software engineers and what a software engineer does. I was on the phone with an expert in artificial intelligence a few days ago, and he was walking me through how ChatGPT could basically write a transcript to train a virtual assistant in a span of 10 minutes.

Saying that that was something he would typically have to hire someone with a master's degree to do and would take at least half a day. Yes, you me, maybe there'll be a bot doing the Brian Lehrer Show in the future. I don't know. We're at an interesting time period right now where this is just bubbling up and we're learning what it could mean.

Brian: There are bots doing most music radio by now, so maybe there'll be a bot doing this show before too long. Can it find bugs and fix them?

Tripp: I don't know what its quality assurance capabilities are. It can certainly write code and help you write code. It's scraped enough of open-source code out there to help do that.

Brian: Can a bot say, "Tina in Central Harlem, you're on WNYC?" Hi, Tina?

[laughter]

Tina: Hi, Brian. Long time, a few times and glowing to-- I'm enjoying the conversation today. I wanted to ask your guest who early in your conversation mentioned how it's a better look for companies when they're all doing it and it's not as negative on them as I guess as opposed to if they were individual companies suddenly doing 6,000 or 8,000 people layoffs. In that vein, I'm wondering the ethic of laying the people off. A lot of companies when they do it, they try to do it ethically, and then the last hire is the first fire, and I'm wondering if that applies to any of these guys.

Brian: Good question. Is it clear to you how the companies decided who to lay off if they had similar skills? Last In, First Out would indicate its younger, lower-paid workers. People with more experience being laid off means people who are making more money, sometimes that's the guiding light for the finance department.

Tripp: Yes, no, the answer is it does vary from company to company. I think if you look behind the numbers at Meta in particular, a lot of that was Last In, First Out just anecdotally scrolling through who people who are on LinkedIn, who've posted and written about being like, Oh, many of those people were hired in the 2021 time period. They were there for about a year, maybe two years during this binge period when every tech company was hiring so many workers.

Contrast that with Google's layoffs more recently, and Google seemed to be a bit more surgical and target what some people who worked there called long-timers. Now long-timers in tech could be somebody in their '40s. It may not be what we all think of when we hear that, but yes, they have some people who seem to fall into this middle tier of the company who'd been there a long time, but maybe weren't a high performer anymore on an upward trajectory into management or some other-- offering something else that made it necessary to keep them, I suppose.

Brian: Last thing, and I'll say this in part as solidarity with let's say my colleagues in the nonprofit sector. Not just public radio, but all across the nonprofit sector, listener tweets, "Brian, there are jobs in the nonprofit and NGO sector that the laid-off tech workers can consider. We need experienced tech workers to fill jobs in the do-good sector." Is that something you've reported on at all Tripp? I imagine the, "Do-good sector doesn't pay as well as the finance sector or the tech sector giants themselves." Maybe there's been trouble hiring people with those skills because of that when there's been a labor glut, but maybe it's a good time to remind people "Hey, you can go work for a nonprofit."

Tripp: No, it's not something I've reported on, but I am seeing, and in my conversations with people, particularly those who came in and are younger, that they've been shaken out of this, I don't know lifestyle delusion. Many of them are thinking about how do I find a job with more meaning. I think some of them certainly will gravitate towards a nonprofit and more mission-oriented company.

That's part of what these tech companies have always sold. If you're Facebook, you're bringing the world together through social media, if you're Google, you're informing the world through search. They've all tried to fashion themselves around some mission, but after these layoffs, you have to presume that some of these companies are going to, or some of these individuals will look for deeper meeting in the work that they do.

Brian: Tripp Mickle, tech Reporter for The New York Times. Thanks so much for joining us.

Tripp: Thanks for having me.

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