Silicon Valley Software Engineers Horrified as They Can't Easily Find Jobs Anymore

Back in 2021, the tech industry was booming. Fueled by generous government subsidies and the pandemic economy, tech companies went on a hiring spree, promising unlimited time off and upward growth opportunities at open offices where kombucha and cold brew flowed from taps.

Flash forward to now, and those taps have run dry. A seemingly endless wave of mass layoffs is ravaging the tech industry as startup fails skyrocket and tech giants shovel their operating budgets into the AI furnace.

And of all the workers devastated by the carnage, former tech workers in Silicon Valley are having a particularly rough go of it.

The region's former software engineers and developers — whose jobs were previously thought to be ironclad — are now having to contend with a fiercely competitive job market in one of the most expensive housing markets in the world.

Many, like former Indeed managing engineer Daelynn Moyer, are considering leaving the industry altogether. The 55 year old life-long tech worker told the Washington Post that she's considering selling her house and retiring early to a farm, after 160 job applications went nowhere.

"It would be a meager existence, but it would be fulfilling," Moyer told the paper. "I would no longer feel like a no longer useful commodity."

Moyer isn't alone — industry events are becoming desperate job fairs full of unemployed tech workers sick of rejection emails.

Many have taken to social media to share the misery of the job hunt with the growing mass of erstwhile tech workers. "I'm looking to move on from tech," commented one Reddit account on a thread about layoffs. "I am burned out on the lengthy interview process and then the rejections. It has done some damage to me physiologically."

Another posted "lessons learned from my tech layoff," saying "I did not know who I was after I got laid off. I looked at myself in the mirror and I could not introduce myself to me. I regret caring so much about 'shareholder value.'"

Unfortunately for American tech workers, the layoff train isn't slowing down.

Yesterday, Meta kicked off "thousands of layoffs," amounting to roughly 5 percent of its staff, some of whom CEO Mark Zuckerberg has vowed to replace with AI systems. And last week, Google offered workers severance in exchange for taking a voluntary layoff, signaling its intention to clamp down on its already consolidated hardware department, which had experienced hundreds of layoffs in spring of last year.

While layoffs are becoming ubiquitous to all layers of tech, they're particularly insidious coming from the magnificent seven — stock-trader parlance for the tech giants Apple, Microsoft, Google (Alphabet), Nvidia, Tesla, Amazon, and Meta — which together are worth more than the stock markets of the UK, Canada, Germany, and France combined, or more than China's entire stock market, which is the second largest in the history of the world.

Put it all together, and an industry that was just recently on top of the world is feeling some serious crunch. And while it's currently the rank-and-file taking the brunt, it remains to be seen how deep the cuts will go — especially because the tech sector, for now, seems hell-bent on pouring money into artificial intelligence.

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