Stunning new data reveals 140% layoff spike in July, with almost half connected to AI and 'technological updates'

My company recently "partnered" with an Indian IT recruitment firm, and we're getting a new, outside CEO in a month. I estimate my chances of still being employed there around Christmas to be 10% at most.

My employer contracted some outside company to send everyone in our IT department surveys with like sections on proficiencies and general personality inventory stuff and such. And then my company laid off 11% of the IT department. At least three levels of management above me found out they were losing people on their team only by external channels like messages from those laid off on Linkedin and such. This was all done by the upper management who had never met most of the people they laid off until the meeting where they laid them off. (Well, basically the entire IT team is remote, so when I say "met" and "meeting", I really mean "Zoom", but you know what I mean.)

Afterword, the company said that the results of the test were only one factor they used in deciding who to axe, but everyone knows better. They said that the criteria on which they decided who to let go and who to keep was how compatible or aligned or something they were with the company's new "modernization" effort.

...and then they immediately contracted with a big company to give us licenses/access to use one of the biggest and most well-known LLMs being marketed for code generation.

So, yeah. This article is basically about my employer. I think this all went down earlier than July in my company's case. And my employer isn't exactly known for being ahead of the curve on most things. But apparently on this snakeoil, they're early adopters. I might check and see when it happened and edit this post to add that info.

So… only 2.7% higher than the decade avg?

In this context, it doesn’t seem as bad as initially described. Anecdotally, it’s still pretty bad. I’ve seen so many people in my industry get let go in the past few months.