I recently ran a Twitter poll asking my followers to estimate how many engineers had been laid off from US-based startups and tech companies in 2022 a

How many engineers have gotten laid off in 2022 and 2023 so far?

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2023-01-27 17:00:09

I recently ran a Twitter poll asking my followers to estimate how many engineers had been laid off from US-based startups and tech companies in 2022 and 2023 so far.

How many software engineers do you think were laid off from startups/tech companies in the US in 2022 AND 2023 so far? (If you've seen me post about this, please abstain from the poll!)

As you can see, 75% of respondents thought that 50K or more engineers had been laid off, and over a third of respondents thought it was at least 100K. Only about a quarter of respondents guessed 10K or fewer.

As it turns out, most people were off by roughly an order of magnitude – the real number is likely somewhere between 7.5K and 10K… which means that the majority of people are operating on incorrect information when they make important career decisions. For instance, how might your answers change to questions like these if you knew that layoffs aren’t as pervasive as you thought?

How do I act at work? Should I even look for a job; it probably makes sense to hunker down and keep my head down, right?? If I’m in the middle of a job search, should I take the first offer? If I just got an offer, should I even try to negotiate… won’t they rescind it if I ask for more money?