The Register Kettle, October 19 2023

The Register Kettle

It has been a bad week for thousands of tech workers this week, with multiple corporations announcing that headcount reduction will continue for the time being.

Around 50 percent of Bandcamp were let go by Epic ahead of the site's sale to Songtradr, Stack Overflow cut headcount by 28%, and LinkedIn showed around 700 people - largely engineers - the door despite Microsoft making very healthy profits. Meanwhile, Nokia slashed its worker numbers by 14,000 after profits slumped and Qualcomm let 1,000 people go last week.

As long as there have been jobs there have been layoffs. While the problem will always be with us the last few years have seen these rounds of redundancies increase in size and frequency.

So, as a timely topic and one close to readers' hearts, in this week's Kettle we ask why the layoffs keep happening. Is it post-COVID belt tightening, corporate greed, the demands of Wall Street, or even AI coming to take over certain job types?

This week we have we have journos Brandon Vigliarolo, Tobias Mann, Jessica Hardcastle, and Iain Thomson. The Kettle producer is Nicole Hemsoth Prickett.