Will Big Tech Layoffs Bring a Culture Shift to Anxiety and Job Insecurity?
Source: Slashdot
Background
Tech industry layoffs may be worse at large tech companies than the rest of the IT industry. The New York Times argues those layoffs have now shifted the culture at Big Tech companies after interviewing more than two dozen workers. “Cooperation and collegiality are on the wane; chumminess between employees and managers has cooled as mutual suspicion pervades their relationships; and a throbbing economic anxiety infects almost every conversation.”
Perhaps no site on the internet reflects this transformation more vividly than Blind, where users can post in private channels restricted to employees of a single company, or public channels visible to anyone.
Scale of Layoffs
Since 2022, large tech companies have collectively laid off more than 150,000 workers, unraveling what many tech workers once perceived as a guarantee of affluence and employability. The threat of being replaced by artificial intelligence looms over those who remain.
- Amazon – more than 15,000 layoffs announced for this year
- Block – 4,000 layoffs
- Meta – 8,000 layoffs
- Oracle – an estimated 30,000 layoffs
By most measures, the sentiments that Blind tracks have taken a turn for the worse. During the nearly four years before the major layoffs began in the fall of 2022, Meta and Microsoft employees posted about career success—topics like how to maximize salary or win promotions—more than four times as often as they posted about job insecurity, according to Blind. Since then, the ratios have reversed: Meta and Microsoft employees now post about job insecurity roughly 1.5 × as often as they post about success.
Impact on Workplace Culture
The shift has had practical effects. A Meta employee told us that some workers on her team now use less vacation time and, breaking with custom, frequently check on projects while on vacation. They increasingly worry about receiving a poor performance review or losing their job if they aren’t constantly available. The employee, who declined to be identified for fear of retribution, said she and many colleagues frequently check Blind because it can be comforting to see how many other Meta workers share their anxieties.
Employees at several companies reported that morale was further undermined by the feeling that layoffs were abrupt, arbitrary, and executed with little empathy. The scarcity of information about possible layoffs raised cortisol levels and made it difficult to focus on work. Workers often fill the vacuum by turning to Blind, which features a “tech layoff tracker” that lists both layoff rumors and confirmed cuts.
Personal Accounts
“I was on Blind five days a week,” said Faith Wilkins El, a software engineer who was laid off from Oracle in late March after more than four years at the company.
Wilkins El, a member of the Oracle Workers Collective—a group seeking better severance agreements—explained that navigating Blind was sometimes stressful because it was hard to know what was true or false. Blind claims it has a security team to weed out bad actors, such as those registering under fake email addresses. Still, she found the platform more helpful than not because the layoffs came as less of a shock after she spent time on the site. “I was trying to get prepared mentally,” she said.
Blind’s Response and New Products
Blind is capitalizing on the increased interest with new products. It plans to unveil a service called Blind AI, which will allow employers to simulate their workers’ reactions to certain changes, such as a stricter in‑office mandate. The company is also close to releasing a feature that alerts users when layoffs are imminent.