Tech layoffs keep stacking up
Much of this is due to the reversal of the tight hiring market.For the past several years tech companies were desperate to hire because everyone was growing and the hiring market was tight. This inevitably results in companies loosening their hiring standards and retaining underperforming employees because they can't afford to reduce team sizes.Layoffs combined with hiring freezes (or slowdowns) signal real stress within a company. However, many of these layoffs are single-digit percentage layoffs from companies that are still hiring across the board. That's not so much a traditional layoff as a pruning of the workforce. That pruning wasn't happening as much when hiring was tight, but now that hiring is easier and real, actual layoffs have put more good candidates back onto the market, the companies who simply collected too many underperforming employees can afford to churn some of them back out of the company. Doing it as a "layoff" makes it more palatable than going on a firing spree.That said, when it comes to interviewing you shouldn't assume that a laid off employee was necessarily underperforming. A lot of companies don't really perform layoffs with surgical precision and will instead drop entire teams at once. I've watched great engineers get swept up in minor staff reductions simply because they were assigned to bad managers or doomed teams that they couldn't save by themselves. I've also hired great people who came right out of layoffs at other companies and I would have missed those resumes if I had been using dumb filtering rules like ignoring anyone who had been laid off.