Yup, I work at a tech company that recently did layoffs. Our headcount post-layoffs is still up over 100% since 2021. You’ll find this is the case with many other tech companies that have done layoffs.

The industry as a whole experienced a COVID-induced bubble with all that stimulus money, rock bottom interest rates, and lockdowns causing huge surges in demand for tech. As a result, we massively overhired ahead of expected growth in demand and obviously in this economic environment, that growth never materialized, resulting in a massively increased cost-to-revenue ratio for many of these tech companies.

It sucks, and these overpaid execs really should’ve known that the bubble was temporary and been more conservative with hiring in the first place, but it’s understandable. And the overall takeaway should be: the tech industry isn’t crashing or dead, it’s simply corrected to where it should have been all this time if COVID never happened.