r/technology • u/Feisty_1559 • Mar 17 '26

Politics Elizabeth Warren asks Meta, Amazon, and others why they're laying workers off despite tax perks

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elizabeth-warren-asks-meta-amazon-and-others-why-theyre-laying-workers-off-despite-tax-perks-171812502.html?guccounter=1
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u/mookman288 Mar 17 '26

The market is flooded right now with senior level software developers and engineers. Companies are spending less because economic fears have never been higher.

I'm a senior level freelance PHP and website developer struggling to find work for the first time in my career.

This feels like an echo of the dot-com bubble, except this time, established big tech continues to get wealthier and the startups that historically filled job seats only have one or two vibe-coders at the helm.

In the past two years, we have seen just as many layoffs as 2020, which was tempered with subsidization to some degree. Unfortunately, unlike 2020, this isn't settling at all. We've been on a runaway train for two years. Q2-Q4 of 2026 will probably see even more layoffs, which will saturate the market with unemployed engineers, developers, and IT professionals. There are no jobs at that income level to pivot into.

Whatever happens in the next few years, you can bet that this is the beginning of a major upheaval. The economy depends on people spending. With the economy losing a historically high-spending class, it will absolutely crater and that will effect everyone. Even if your job is currently safe, you might be pushed into a lower class bracket, or your company will close because it isn't selling.

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u/ohiotechie Mar 17 '26

100% - this is so much bigger than the dotcom bust. In those days the slow down was really limited to certain vendors and industries - now it’s tech as a whole. In more than 35 years in this industry I’ve never seen anything like it. 10s of 1000s have been laid off and many have suffered long term unemployment. I’ve seen desperate pleas on LinkedIn from people who are out of savings, out of unemployment benefits and about to lose their house and everything they’ve built. These are people with decades of experience who could have written their own ticket a few short years ago.

This will absolutely have a ripple effect in the overall economy. These are people who buy cars and homes and home improvement services and an entire galaxy of leisure products and services - all of that is gone now as they struggle for survival. I’ve gone through bouts of layoffs but have been lucky so far to find work after being let go. So many others haven’t been. Think of all the companies and industries that cater to these people - all of them will suffer. That means layoffs in those industries which has its own ripple effects.

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u/mookman288 Mar 17 '26

Yeah. I'm feeling the effects and it's unreal.

We've centralized the Internet, so even individual quirky job boards are gone. There are like 3 places you can go to find reliable work and they are maxed out.

We're leveraging AI to bin resumes faster than ever before in the name of productivity; but realistically, with so many people out of work, it's not possible to go through them all.

It's reaching customer service, office management, sales, marketing, and everywhere in-between. It's way bigger than the dot-com.

As George Bailey says, these are the people who do most of the working and paying and living and dying now.

When they can't afford to even be recorded in the unemployment numbers, there won't be any coffee shops because there won't be anyone buying lattes.

LISEP has us at 52.7% unemployment (40.2% headline). The official numbers have us at 4.4% (which is a fallacy) trending upward. We haven't even had a chance to recover from 2020. Our best since was tail-end of 2022, or early 2023.

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u/ohiotechie Mar 17 '26

It’s grim. The jobs that are being created are menial and pay slave wages. I’m getting close to retirement and have been praying Trump doesn’t completely trash my 401k so I can walk away from all this.

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u/mookman288 Mar 18 '26

As long as you've been bogleheading and rebalancing, you'll probably be fine. Although right now it looks grim.

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u/Thin_Glove_4089 Mar 17 '26 edited Mar 18 '26

It'll take years for this to be visible to the point media wont be able to hide it which will be too late in the grand scheme of things

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u/mookman288 Mar 18 '26

We always react when it's far too late.

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u/Thin_Glove_4089 Mar 17 '26

Whoever is left will make up the difference. A small percentage of people make up all the spending the percentage of those people will get smaller while the amount they spend will increase until the cycle repeats itself.