All large companies affected - 2023 will be bad
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All LARGE? Nope. Our company is safe, and sound and we are growing.
Great insights, in this industry I quickly learnt that anyone can be a victim to a layoff and never to judge an engineer on that. I think the vast majority understand this, and I hope this sentiment will help anyone affected.
It is incomprehensible to me how Intel could have hired all of these workers over the last two years... Knowing darn well demand was going to fall off a cliff.
Even a HS economics class understands simple supply/demand curves. And worse yet, Intel knows the PC refresh cycle better then anyone. When the lock downs happened, PC demand was pulled forward. Many companies bought computers for workers who didn't have them at home. Computer refresh cycle used to be 4-5 years but now with all those cores and big memory you can wait 10 years. Intel should have seen this coming a mile away and only hired the bare minimum to meet the production hump.
Much of this is due to the reversal of the tight hiring market.
For the past several years tech companies were desperate to hire because everyone was growing and the hiring market was tight. This inevitably results in companies loosening their hiring standards and retaining underperforming employees because they can't afford to reduce team sizes.
Layoffs combined with hiring freezes (or slowdowns) signal real stress within a company. However, many of these layoffs are single-digit percentage layoffs from companies that are still hiring across the board. That's not so much a traditional layoff as a pruning of the workforce. That pruning wasn't happening as much when hiring was tight, but now that hiring is easier and real, actual layoffs have put more good candidates back onto the market, the companies who simply collected too many underperforming employees can afford to churn some of them back out of the company. Doing it as a "layoff" makes it more palatable than going on a firing spree.
That said, when it comes to interviewing you shouldn't assume that a laid off employee was necessarily underperforming. A lot of companies don't really perform layoffs with surgical precision and will instead drop entire teams at once. I've watched great engineers get swept up in minor staff reductions simply because they were assigned to bad managers or doomed teams that they couldn't save by themselves. I've also hired great people who came right out of layoffs at other companies and I would have missed those resumes if I had been using d-mb filtering rules like ignoring anyone who had been laid off.