2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March (opens in new tab)

This is missing a lot of data. Companies that I know for a fact are doing mass tech layoffs are not listed here.

If you go into the larger field, the trend since 2021 is overall concerning, particularly if you factor in Trump's desire to just stop reporting: https://www.macrotrends.net/3208/us-layoffs-and-discharges

Surprised it took this long. I feel bad for the employees, but I can’t remember the last success they had. Metaverse, VR, throwing absurd money at AI and for what?

That's going to happen in all of big tech (already happening at Amazon and Microsoft). These companies have too many employees. It was never really justified and with AI even more so. I've been in big tech and directors often tell everyone to hire when they can rather when they need. For example, if they know a hiring freeze is coming, they will try to hire as many people as they can before it happens. It's rare to find people in big tech where their incentives align with the company. (and the blame is not always on the people themselves)

As for Meta, I give Mark credit for trying, even if he failed so far with all the VR stuff. The main disappointment is about Llama cause it's clearly an execution problem. With Meta's investments in AI throughout the years, not being able to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI is a big failure.

It’s a lobbying firm now isn’t it?

Yep - IME the trick is that fixing a bloated company is 2 parts: laying off bloat, and fixing the bad processes / restructuring the company to not need so much bloat in the first place.

I’ve worked at a company that pulled the layoff lever a lot but never did the hard work of investing in fixing the broken stuff… the layoffs actually just made everything worse.

If you have a team whose job is to put duct tape on the widget when it leaks, and you lay off most of that team without fixing the widget, your leak gets worse because you have fewer people with duct tape.

What you need is find people who can fix the widget, then fire all the duct tape people.

Every big company I’ve worked for has an immense about of bloat. Whole departments that exist just because someone wanted it to exist at some point in time.

The health of an organization is often linked in their ability to fire people.

Lots of different companies argue with the AI for some time before they call me, but they always call me.

They'll never be able to explain what they want to the AI, and even if they could, it couldn't solve the problem anyway.

Nevertheless I'm not going to be contracting much longer, I'm writing software by hand to compete with the garbage shat out of Claude's VibeCloaca. I already have customers, I just need to ... tune a few things before I scale, so that I don't have any customer support problems at scale. :)

They picked the enshittification generators over paying people to enshittify by hand.

Well, maybe they can spin up some fake users with all those GPUs to use their shitty site.

(Oh, heh. I just remembered that they actually did that: https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/10/meta-acquired-moltbook-the...)

Good choice

Google's projected AI capex spend is $170-180 billion for this year. It's unreasonable to think AI would not be a reason for companies to consider layoffs.

Some of this smells purely nihilistic. The market rewarded layoffs with higher stock prices, incentivizing more layoffs.

It’s the business cycle, mostly. During the pandemic, low interest rates drove a boom in risk investing that flowed downhill into tech company balance sheets. Of course everyone used the money to hire lots of developers and engineers - probably more than were needed for the business opportunity they were exploiting.

I think AI is being used as an excuse for layoffs rather than the cause. Companies don’t have the cash and times got a bit too rich. This is the cyclical pull back that has been going on for decades.

It's probably a mix of AI productivity boost and market cycle. There is some substance to AI job loss, but I believe jevons paradox will eventually catch up to transformer-based LLM capabilities.

I'm the last remaining frontend developer after multiple rounds of layoffs. With claude code I'm able to do 2x-3x the work I was able to do before it existed. It's hard for me to rationally argue we need more frontend developers.

Either? Both? The question is too zoomed-out. It's going to be different for each company and maybe different for each round of layoffs.

Both. AI can help you be more productive with fewer people, but a growing company still needs many people commanding AI to expand into a market.

The "real impact" of AI being gargantuan spending, or something else?

The public reason given for a layoff is always a self-serving excuse.

I was laid off from Atlassian this/last week. Since then I've been playing Satisfactory for 12 hours a day.

Crazy thing is, I delivered optimizations that saved 1m USD over the last 12 months, with another optimization in-flight that would save another 1m USD. I thought that was enough to protect me from layoffs/PIPs - I guess no one was counting.

AI is just an excuse for layoffs which IMO CEOs are trying to use to recover share prices from the SaaS-pocalypse. Looks like layoffs aren't hitting the same for stock prices as they once were.

Being ghosted, hazed, and otherwise abused. No one is hiring at restaurants, etc either. A recession has probably started.

Interviewing 4 times just to get ghosted.

Trying to build my own thing.

Is that the only reason they announced it early?

My experience has been that a good small team, even full of people who’d stand no chance in a FAANG interview (fwiw) can outperform at least 5x as many devs in your median bigco, while maintaining a relaxed pace.

The reason for this has nothing to do with how productive the devs are per se and everything to do with bloated decision making processes and extremely high communication overhead. “AI” does nothing for that (in fact, I’m seeing integrated suggestions in ticket tracking tools making things spammier and reducing quality of tickets, so if anything, it’s making it worse)

No what happens from using those metrics is that you filter out all the people that care more about doing their job well than gaming metrics. Fraudsters tend to do really well in those situations.