The Cycle Completed Faster Than Expected
The tech layoff wave of 2022–2023 was genuinely large. Meta cut 21,000 employees. Amazon cut 27,000. Google cut 12,000. Microsoft cut 10,000. The numbers were staggering, and the human cost was real.
By mid-2024, the same companies — and many that cut even more aggressively — are posting hiring plans that partially reverse those reductions. The cycle completed in approximately 18 months.
Why the Reversal
The proximate cause is AI. Every major tech company has concluded that AI development requires more engineering headcount than they currently have — specifically, ML engineers, AI researchers, and the infrastructure engineers who can build and maintain large-scale model training and inference systems.
The cuts of 2022–2023 were real-estate for AI investment. Companies reduced headcount in traditional engineering roles to free up budget for AI talent, which commands significantly higher compensation.
What This Means for Engineers
Traditional software engineering roles — CRUD applications, frontend work, basic backend services — face genuine pressure from AI-assisted development tools. An engineer who was writing routine code three years ago is in a different market than they were.
AI-adjacent roles are in a hiring frenzy. ML engineering, AI safety research, prompt engineering, and AI product management are all commanding compensation that would have seemed absurd in 2020.
The lesson is not that tech is safe or unsafe. It is that tech is, as always, in the process of redefining itself, and the engineers who move toward what is being built rather than away from what is being automated will be fine.