The reality of today's tech industry: layoffs, long hours, AI threats, and few perks

In a nutshell: It had long been said that a career in tech was the ultimate dream: high salaries, security, and a huge number of perks made for some very happy workers. But things look quite different today. The tech world has seen the highest number of layoffs of any private sector industry this year; perks have been cut; salaries aren't increasing in line with the extra demands; and there's the constant spectre of AI. As parodied in the brilliant Silicon Valley show, there was a time when some tech employees were paid fortunes to do almost nothing in their jobs. Their enviable situation was still being reported a couple of years ago, when companies were flush with cash and had hired extra workers during the pandemic boom. Now, we're faced with almost weekly headlines about tech's massive job cuts. Intel recently confirmed it is making layoffs that could impact 20,000+ people. Meta has cut 5% of its workforce in performance-based layoffs, something that Microsoft is also doing. Then ... Read full article.