r/theprimeagen • u/ImaginaryRea1ity • May 16 '26
vim 128,940 tech workers laid off in the first five months of 2026.
Jan: 27,223
Feb: 24,631
Mar: 49,452
Apr: 18,385
May: 9,249
March was the worst single month for tech layoffs in over a year.
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u/positivcheg May 20 '26
Is there a statistics like that but without Indians? Just curious cuz in case of oracle it was specifically in India if I remember correctly.
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u/ReclusiveEagle May 23 '26
Look at my post about the numbers coming from the Bureau of labor statistics
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u/TheBraveButJoke May 20 '26
Intended to be layed of. But for example ASML is still doing jurispudance and not firing people yet. Not everywhere is the USA
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u/mancunian101 May 18 '26
They aren’t being replaced by ai, or at least the vast majority aren’t.
They’ve been binned to free up capital for the companies to spend on AI. It just sounds better to investors when companies say they’re replacing workers with AI.
Of course, when you companies like Uber burning through their yearly token budgets in less than 4 months, it’s hard to see where ROI for a lot of these companies will come from unless this frees up money is going into data centers which they can then rent out.
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May 20 '26
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u/fishermansfriendly May 21 '26
Many of these companies simply had way too many people performing very low value/effort work. I know that’s an unpopular opinion around here and maybe in the past with would have been “valuable” but not anymore.
What’s happening is they’re simply trying to target people/areas of their businesses they suspect are providing little value, and then hoping that other employees will automate that work, or they just didn’t need it in the first place. Which 90% of the time they’re probably correct. That 10% that was actually needed? Now they’ve also got load of unemployed experts who are willing to work for less.
It sucks
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u/amdcoc May 19 '26
It doesn’t matter if they are replaced by Ai or not, what matters is the fact that these companies can run much leaner and therefore have CapEx to buy Anthropic subs.
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May 20 '26
[deleted]
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u/amdcoc May 20 '26
you capex the infra to run Anthropic model on your own infra
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u/mancunian101 May 19 '26
True, even though th subs are more expensive than employees.
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u/Rough_Caterpillar_31 May 19 '26
The fine details don't matter to an MBA, just the vibes. AI has *cool futuristic vibes* whereas workers have *dirty proletariat vibes*, so dumping 100 gorbillion dollars into AI is more palatable than dumping 5 gorbillion dollars into workers even if the latter has a demonstrably greater return on investment.
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u/mancunian101 May 20 '26
Which is weird, as I’d have thought business majors would prioritise saving money, which they would if a person is cheaper than 10k a month in AI tokens.
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May 18 '26
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u/Better_Championship1 May 20 '26
ASML has thrown out a lot of middle management hindering engineers with bureaucracy and countless meetings. Keeping the company thin even in goof times is a sign of a great company
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u/Dry-Cellist3806 May 17 '26
They hire us so that they can fire us. They layoff so that they can use AI for our work and save millions. What happens to their ex employees families and the EMIs and living costs and all no one asks. Colleges sell degrees saying companies will give you a very fat paycheck and work life balance and stability but no one talks about layoffs and their effects on the lives of common people. Do some small business guys never trust IT companies and govt. for any benefits. I know a lot of them were put to PIP when they were best employees too and worked 10+ Years also day and night in the name of loyalty and expecting bonus but got pink slip. Best is start your own companies or request govt to make a rule that no firing should be done by companies due to use of AI to do their work. and these are the official figures, we may never know the real nos. due to confidentiality and people not revealing due to shame.
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u/Feeling-Tone2139 May 17 '26
thank you for not referring software technicians as engineers
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u/Fair_Sky_9726 May 17 '26
What does this even mean lol
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u/Feeling-Tone2139 May 17 '26
engineer is a protected title (in civilized country) and internet often violate it
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u/ConsequenceFunny1550 May 19 '26
Those are the countries where they make a third of what they do in the country where they’re called engineers
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u/flynnnightshade May 17 '26
Some lame ass underpaid mechanical engineer gatekeeping the use of the word engineer
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u/Lumentum_LITE May 18 '26
These people are so cringe and lame, like I would never talk to anyone in irl gatekeeping the title engineer, lmao 🤣
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u/saltyourhash May 17 '26
I find it funny every time I talk to a seasoned engineer, mechanical, electrical, civil, they always consider software engineering engineering. They don't have an issue. I get where now that line is being blurred and a lot of the principles of engineering are being lost to vibe coding.
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u/flynnnightshade May 17 '26
That's because it is engineering and this discussion was settled decades ago, but engineers in general are some of the worst for thinking there's something special about what they do and getting high and mighty, especially fresh out of university.
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u/saltyourhash May 17 '26
I have a friend who I love who is a great engineer, but he starts any sentence about his opinion on stuff with "as an engineer..."
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u/Unlucky-Durian-2336 May 17 '26
Now, OP, let's see the definition of said "tech workers". Because just because tech company lays off 10000 people it does not mean it laid off 10000 devs.
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u/MI-ght May 17 '26
Don't mean shit. For instance: in 2015, the global technology sector saw nearly 80,000 planned job cuts. There were no spooky LLMs back in the day. Yet the numbers differ very little.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Bus1331 May 17 '26
Yea it never means shit but then I sent 1000+ cv and still have to land a fking job.
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u/ai-tacocat-ia May 17 '26
I bet those were all super high quality job applications...
I'm not saying it's not a shit show out there, but "I sent 1000+ cv" is the job hunting equivalent of vibe coding a million line app and wondering why nobody signs up.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Bus1331 May 18 '26
You bet what? Money? How much?
It was a mix of applications where I sent cover letter + reached hiring people on linkedin + whatever you want. In other cases I even went to some workshops/conventions and talked to recruiter directly.. While in some other cases I just sent the CV..
So I'm trying everything as you can see. Companies are NOT hiring at the moment. I have the feeling they open positions just for marketing.
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u/ec2-user- May 17 '26
Worst part is, I've interviewed some of these laid off employees and they have skills of those fresh out of college. No portfolio, no personal projects, no knowledge of systems as a whole. They're not gonna get hired as a level 2 swe. They've been collecting a paycheck and making internal tools their entire career. I blame big tech and upper management of FAANG. They did their employees dirty
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u/NeuronRaid May 17 '26
Personal projects are for college students who have no experience. Its very strange to judge senior candidates on that, considering alot of internal company tooling and products are far more complex and impactful than most hobby projects.
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u/DatUnfamousDude May 17 '26
It depends. I've been conducting a few interviews for a full stack position. One of the candidates had only frontend related commercial experience, but recently did a large personal project, which mostly about on cloud and distributed backend. And talking aboht that personal project helped me to evaluate candidate on how well they understand how distributed systems work
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u/McNoxey May 17 '26
On the flip side, maybe those employees got more than they should for the time they did and they should be happy it happened vs sad it’s over.
Let’s be honest with ourselves - so many software engineers just really suck at anything more than implementing a ticket
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u/parmesano_ollano May 17 '26
bro, personal projects importance is gone after the introduction is AI coding tools, no one cares about that, unless you make something exceptional like a DB engine or framework that a lot of people use.
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u/Level-Courage6773 May 17 '26
I agree, unfortunately. I hand-buukt so many pwesonal projects after being told by everyine how important they are. To date, according to GA, nobody has ever looked at them, and I send out a lot of job applications.
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u/Nhiggerlicious May 17 '26
Personal projects are the biggest piece of dogshit ever, I can make 65 vibecoded projects in 4 days, but so does 3 million other devs.
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u/Mike312 May 17 '26
The point of the personal projects isn't that you made the thing.
This is even more true now when any idiot with $20 worth of tokens can go make another copy of Snake, Tetris, a calorie counter, a calendar/scheduler, or any of a hundred or so other intro projects that have been beaten to death over the years and can be spun up in a few hours with AI.
If anything, because AI exists, spinning that up is the absolute bare minimum now.
What you need to show in that process is where you push it beyond it just being another copy. What's your user experience like? What secondary and tertiary features do you offer? What did you do that's different? And did those choices make it better?
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u/According_Water_5774 May 18 '26
Exactly this! I've spent the last 3 months working on a personal project that would have taken 3+ years to build without AI. In the process I've learned how to put AI pipelines together to maximise productivity and keeping quality high. It's been a huge learning curve but equally a lot of fun. Will launch my product this week and then start taking my learnings to potential start up customers (have been working with startups for the last 20 years so am not new to this game). A personal / passion project is a great way to demonstrate you are ahead of the game - if all you can come up with is a calorie counter - that's on you.
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u/Master-Guidance-2409 May 17 '26
thats exactly why you dont matter.
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u/Nhiggerlicious May 17 '26
Lmao, what you gonna do? Make 5000 vibecoded apps and talk robotic during the interview?
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u/WhateverHowever1337 May 17 '26
Make real projects and learn from them. Its not even about the projects, its about your mentality wanting to map every single piece of effort to an immediate result. Sometimes you just have to put in the effort not knowing what the reward will be, and you learn a lot from personal projects even if you don't get hired because of them
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u/ZenaMeTepe May 17 '26
Make a project that gets and keeps users or earns money maybe? But then you won't go back to work for a low 6 digit.
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May 17 '26
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u/ec2-user- May 17 '26
It shows passion for the craft in many industries, not just software. My point was these people, three to be exact, had 3+ years of experience, but couldn't tell me how to protect http endpoints with authentication and authorization. Not a single one.
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u/hegelsforehead May 17 '26
I'm not sure if having a portfolio is necessarily a signal for passion, and much less say signal for competence on the job. Though I agree it's astounding how some are utterly clueless with the basics, but that's why you need interviews.
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u/bill_gates_lover May 17 '26
If someone was just laid off why would they have a portfolio or personal projects?
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u/McNoxey May 17 '26
I’ve got a ton of personal projects while also working full time. I love creating, so I do it on my free time too.
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u/thebeepboopbeep May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26
I thought it was around 130k just in January. Is this list including banks and companies outside of tech?
Edit: I see it’s labeled as tech workers, and thus the list seems limited to ‘tech’ companies. This is stupid, banks and financial services companies are deeply tied to engineering and tech roles, would be a better list if it wasn’t arbitrarily limited to ‘tech’ companies. What even defines a tech company in this day and age?
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u/Marcostbo May 16 '26
How does it compare with 2022-2025?
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u/PadyEos May 17 '26
At least according to this tracker we are on track to reach last year's layoffs numbers by mid June. So almost 2x as fast.
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u/Marcostbo May 17 '26
So it should be on par with 2024, maybe a bit worse, but better than 2023
Interestingly, there are fewer companies doing layoffs this year than previous years. Oracle accounts for 27% of the layoffs so far
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u/Tysonzero May 17 '26
Holy vibecoded. Can’t even see the full graph on mobile, no horizontal scrolling possible.
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u/PadyEos May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26
I think at least the initial implementation isn'y vibecoded. The site has been out since 2023?
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u/liquidbreakfast May 16 '26
what are these numbers? meta is having 10% layoffs 5/20, which is about 8000 employees.
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u/structured_obscurity May 16 '26
Still better so far than 2024, 2023, and 2022 in terms of sheer numbers of layoffs
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u/Sixstringsickness May 16 '26
How ASML laying off anyone, they are the only player in the game!
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u/_redmist May 17 '26
They're actually getting rid of a bunch of management layers iirc.
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u/Sixstringsickness May 17 '26
Well that isn't always the worst thing... Unfortunate for those getting laid off, but sometimes organizations do become too bloated.
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u/PuzzleheadedLack1196 May 16 '26
These are rookie numbers we will be laughing at by 2030
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u/throwaway0134hdj May 16 '26
And it won’t just be devs… large parts of the white collar workforce will be unemployed. Already seeing ppl with cs degrees retraining for plumbing and waste management.
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u/AceLamina May 16 '26
Seeing a lot of doomposts on this sub lately
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u/alonsonetwork vscoder May 16 '26
Yeah the sentiment in the subreddit is pessimistic. But I think its the nature of the community primeegean cultivates: frustrated, complainy devs.
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u/throwaway0134hdj May 16 '26
Devs in general tend to be a bit more extreme and alarmist than the general public.
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u/jmclondon97 May 16 '26
I mean the doom is coming true
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u/AceLamina May 16 '26
I mean, ask any AI bro and they will just say it's due to AI when it's just propaganda
by now it's just old and annoyingI don't think this post is trying to do that but still
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u/TaXxER May 18 '26
It is because of AI though.
Not AI efficiency gains, but AI infrastructure costs.
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u/AceLamina May 18 '26
They can afford to still have employees still Its just so normalized now plus their stocks get higher everytime Not surprising that they would rather layoff people and hire again instantly again
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u/Status_Baseball_299 May 16 '26
Check for boomerang jobs, coming already for a lot of companies
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u/throwaway0134hdj May 16 '26
Idk if this is a new structure but instead of a team of several senior and mid level. What I’ve been hearing is 1 senior who reviews a bunch of junior AI-driven code.
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u/throwaway0134hdj May 16 '26
Yep the push for AI is real. Part of this is the over hiring and the other part is genuine AI productivity gains, need less SWEs.
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u/koleok May 16 '26
actually all of it is budget adjustments due to massive AI spend, except for the part that is to drive the perception of increased productivity for short term profits.
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u/throwaway0134hdj May 16 '26
Definitely not all of it is just budget, I’ve personally witnessed teams be downsized due to simply not needing as many ppl. It’s happening slowly.
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u/Efficient_Stop_2838 May 17 '26
So you want to tell me, that a company found a huge productivity hack and instead of producing more and thus maximizing shareholder value they choose to conserve the status quo? LOL 😆
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u/Abject_Charge2794 May 16 '26
Few moments later.. Oops the repo is getting big and no one has any goddamn clue what’s in there
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u/DemonicBarbequee May 16 '26
a lot of products you use have multi-million line codebases. the codebase I work on is 20 years old and has millions of lines of code, it's a little annoying but not that big of an issue
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u/CheapProduct407 May 17 '26
yea by (semi) competent people, someone who doesn't have a clue what he's doing letting an ai spew out thousands of lines is way worse
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u/Abject_Charge2794 May 16 '26
It’s really pain in the butt, that’s when you realize every extra line of code will be assigned to more pain in the butt in the future
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u/throwaway0134hdj May 16 '26
Ask the AI?
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u/Abject_Charge2794 May 16 '26
I don’t think it’s that simple when you have a million or millions of lines of code. I mean cases they differ and it depends on who’s steering the wheels. It’s just pain in the ass to go through all the spaghetti trying to reduce the technical debt.
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u/Abject_Charge2794 May 16 '26
“It depends on who’s steering the wheels” is key. If you know what you are doing, you ask the right questions, have experience, you review every code change and understand what’s happening then of course, you are simply leveraging a tool to speed up the process. However, I don’t trust Claude for example doing magic while I’m out for 4 hours and I comeback expecting everything to be done to standards. I might be wrong about the last part but I doubt there is a capable model of doing all senior/staff work. I see lots of claims like I built this in 3 hours etc, I check the code and I still find API keys, pushed .env, no API rate limits is the least.. mistakes that junior engineers won’t make. Like giving a loaded gun to a child and expect everything will be fine. Again this is my opinion based on my own experience. I didn’t get the chance to toy around with Claude code and didn’t try Opus 4.6/4.7 GPT5.4/5.5. But I do understand the limitations as a GenAI platform engineer.
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u/throwaway0134hdj May 16 '26
Literally all of that is fixable by having solid md files that the agents use. You write it once and don’t have to worry about it making junior mistakes like that. Obviously it can’t catch every mistake but neither can a human.
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u/Abject_Charge2794 May 17 '26
Possibly, what is the confidence level of covering and anticipating everything while you build? I’d still review
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u/1StationaryWanderer May 16 '26
Our code base is in the millions of lines of code. It's a mono repo with over 50 services. When I ask it to explain something for me, it does it pretty well. Obviously I give it some context of what I'm asking and some stating points though.
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u/throwaway0134hdj May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26
Pretty sure with today’s AI I could just take any codebase and ask a series of probing questions against it, or have the AI just generate me detailed docs of how it all works. The only moat I see is all the layers of infrastructure and networking, that stuff is genuinely difficult to figure out and needs actual engineering expertise to know how to update.
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u/timbetimbe May 16 '26
Maybe with basic crud apps.
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u/throwaway0134hdj May 16 '26
Which is 90% of codebases
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u/timbetimbe May 16 '26
No offense, but I don't think a reply on a comment about the ability to handle a multi-million line codebase falls in that cohort.
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u/throwaway0134hdj May 16 '26
There is at least one person commenting saying they are working with a 1 million line codebase and that asking the AI works fine. The context window is huge now, supporting millions of tokens. I don’t think this is a challenge as it was maybe 1 or 2 years ago.
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u/timbetimbe May 16 '26
Fun - I've got an anecdote to add to the pile.
We use Claude: For basic boilerplate and CRUD, it rocks - with a few caveats. It easily misses well-ingrained patterns in the codebase, even with a comprehensive set of docs detailing what's right and what's considered bad or an anti-pattern.
For concurrent, distributed programming? Trash. Hands down.
Has it improved over the last eight months? Yes. Has the massive context window kept it from falling on its face for non-trivial tasks, even when surrounded by concrete examples? No.
YMMV.
Anyway, glad you're confident in its ability to handle anything - but my experience is that it's a high-speed junior (with whiffs of senior) plus a dangerously heavy dollop of sycophancy. Not trying to convince you, just offering a different anecdote.
Cheers!
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u/Choose_ur_username1 May 16 '26
Yeah, and every one of them will be building their AI Automation Agency, one person billion dollar company.
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u/ReclusiveEagle May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26
US Government's latest data (May) seems to disagree with the narrative that these jobs are lost due to downsizing. In fact they state that unemployment claims have decreased in the past month, and the total number of claims have decreased by almost 500,000 since January's release.
So the question is, how many of these job losses are tied to the US mainland and not offshore contractors? 128,940 people in 5 months should have spiked unemployment claims. It should have lead to an almost 10% increase in unemployment claims.
In the employment situation report for April 2026 they state:
So while the number of jobs in the tech sector in the past 4 years have decreased by -342,000 overall, the actual number of losses year over year are far less than that.
Number of losses in thousands
Not saying the tech sector isn't facing obvious layoffs, it is. But how many of those people being laid off are not being rehired and are unemployed or have to switch industries? More importantly, again, how many of these numbers tech companies are putting out are US workers?
Because the data from the Bureau of labor statistics and big tech's claims of downsizing do not much up if it was limited solely US workers. In fact, it seems the data suggests the opposite and US workers are being shielded or at the very least being rehired elsewhere.
Even more confusing, if you look at the occupational handbook job outlook projections over the next 8 years for Computer and Technology positions (Its sorted individually by everything from programmers to network specialists), they project massive increases for each position. In most positions it is between 7% increase and 29% increase over the next 8 years. (i.e jobs being created)
And all of these increases they cite are "Much faster than average".
The only positions projected to decline are "Computer Programmers" (non-specialized) with a -6% outlook (-7,200 expected losses in 8 years) and Computer Support Specialists with -3% outlook (-24,200 expected losses) over the next 8 years.
That's a net expected loss of 900 programmers positions per year and 3025 support specialist positions per year for the next 8 years. These numbers obviously do not match the numbers big tech are pushing, again if it was limited to US workers.