硅谷裁员潮后，大厂员工何去何从？ | 经济学人商业

Business | The sack of Silicon Valley

商业 | 硅谷裁员潮

Business | The sack of Silicon Valley

商业 | 硅谷裁员潮

Where have all the sacked tech workers gone?

被裁之后，大厂员工何去何从？

Employment in the technology industry has reached an inflection point

科技行业就业已达拐点

注释（参见Cambridge Dictionary）：

1. sack：remove sb. from job/a situation in which sb. is removed from the job. 解雇

2. inflection: change in a word (grammar) or change in voice (speech). 变化

To understand the shift in tone that has taken place in Silicon Valley in recent months, look no further than Mark Zuckerberg’s declaration in February that 2023 would be the “year of efficiency”. It is hardly the kind of language to set the pulse racing—unless you are an employee on the receiving end of it. On March 14th Meta, the tech giant Mr Zuckerberg runs, announced it would fire 10,000 staff—on top of the 11,000 it laid off last November.

要想了解最近几个月硅谷的基调转变，只需看向马克·扎克伯格（Mark Zuckerberg）今年2月的宣言：2023将是“效率之年”。这番宣言平平无奇，很难让人心跳加速——可如果你是扎克伯格手下的员工，情况就不一样了。3月14日，扎克伯格掌管的科技巨头Meta宣布，将在去年11月裁员1.1万人的基础上再解雇1万名员工。

注释：

1. pulse: the regular beating of the heart, especially when it is felt at the wrist or side of the neck. (Cambridge Dictionary) 脉搏

Meta is not alone. On March 20th Amazon, another tech behemoth, said it would cut a further 9,000 corporate employees, having already let 18,000 white-collar types go. So far this year American tech firms have announced 118,000 sackings, according to Crunchbase, a data provider, adding to the 140,000 jobs cut last year. And more may lie ahead. On March 24th the chief operating officer of Salesforce, a business-software firm, hinted that the company would soon add to the 8,000 lay-offs it announced in January.

宣布裁员计划的不止Meta一家。3月20日，另一家科技巨头亚马逊也宣称将再裁员9000人，此前亚马逊已辞退了1.8万名白领。据数据公司Crunchbase统计，在去年削减14万个职位的基础上，今年到目前为止，美国科技公司宣布的裁员人数已达11.8万人。后续可能还有更多人被裁。商业软件公司Salesforce今年1月宣布裁员8000人，3月24日，其首席运营官暗示很快将进行下一波裁员。

注释：

1. behemonth: something that is extremely large and often extremely powerful. (Cambridge Dictionary) 庞然大物

Investors have cheered tech’s new-found cost-consciousness. The tech-heavy NASDAQ index is up 16% on its recent low point in late December. And there is more to come. Firings since the start of 2022 represent only 6% of the American tech industry’s workforce. Because tech companies continued to hire throughout 2022, lay-offs have only just begun to reduce total industry employment (see chart 1). By comparison, between the peak of the dotcom boom at the start of the 2000s and its nadir at the end of 2003, America’s overall tech workforce declined by 23%, or 685,000 jobs.

投资者们却为科技公司最近形成的成本意识而欢呼。以科技股为主的纳斯达克指数较最近的低位（去年12月底）上涨了16%，而这还仅仅只是开始。自2022年初以来的被裁人数仅占美国科技行业劳动力的6%。因为科技公司2022一整年都在持续招人，裁员风波才刚刚开始引起行业总就业人数的下降（见图1）。反观本世纪初，美国科技行业劳动力规模从互联网繁荣期的峰值下跌了23%，于2003年年底抵达低谷，工作岗位锐减68.5万个。

注释：

1. nadir: the worst moment or the lowest point. 最低点（参见Cambridge Dictionary）

Still, the recent lay-offs have been widespread and deep enough to warrant two questions. First, who is getting the chop? And second, where are the laid-off workers going?

尽管如此，最近的裁员风波范围之广、影响之深引发了两个问题：哪些岗位会被裁掉？被裁员工该去往何方？

注释：

1.warrant: (make necessary) to make a particular action necessary or correct, or to be a reason to do something. (Cambridge Dictionary)

So far techies themselves have been mostly spared, observes Tim Herbert of the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), a trade body. Instead, the axe has fallen mainly on business functions like sales and recruitment. These had grown steadily as a share of tech-industry employment in recent years, a telltale sign of bloat (see chart 2). Between the depths of the pandemic in the spring of 2020 and peak employment at the start of 2023, the tech sector added around 1m workers. Simply hiring such numbers required hiring plenty of recruiters; as a headhunting rule of thumb, one recruiter can hire 25 new employees a year. Many of those recruiters may now be surplus to requirements.

美国计算机行业协会（CompTIA）首席研究官蒂姆·郝伯特（Tim Herbert）表示，目前为止技术人员大多数都“幸免于难”，而裁员之斧主要落在了销售和招聘等业务部门上。近年来，销售和招聘部门在科技行业劳动力所占的比例持续上升，说明这一领域也出现人员冗余的现象（见图2）。从2020年春季疫情最严重时开始，到2023年年初就业人数达到峰值，这期间科技行业新增就业约一百万人左右。单单招入数量如此庞大的人员就需要招入大量的招聘人员；猎头圈的经验是：一名招聘人员一年能招聘25人。如今，许多招聘人员已经不再需要了。

But the specialists are not immune. As part of its lay-offs, Meta will restructure its tech functions in April. Releasing talented tech workers back into the wild could be a boon for other sectors wrestling with digital reinvention. For years unsexy industries like industrial goods have struggled to compete with the tech industry for talent. Now they are pouncing. John Deere, an American tractor-maker, has been snapping up fired tech workers to help it make smarter farm machinery. Last year the firm opened an office in Austin, a thriving tech hub in Texas. Carmakers, increasingly focused on software, are also hungry for tech talent. So are banks, health insurers and retailers.

然而，技术人员也难逃裁员之斧。Meta将在4月重组技术职能部门，这也是裁员计划的一部分。技术人才重返就业市场，对那些正竭力实现数字化转型的行业来说可谓是一大福音。多年来，工业产品等传统行业与科技行业相比，吸引力不足，难以与之争夺人才，现如今他们终于可以一扑而上。美国拖拉机制造商迪尔公司（John Deere）一直在招兵买马，雇佣下岗技术人员设计制造更加智能的农用机械产品。去年，迪尔公司在德克萨斯州的科技中心奥斯丁设立办事处。汽车厂商越来越注重软件，对技术人才也是求贤若渴。银行、医疗保险公司、零售商亦是如此。

Some of the laid-off techies are also helping fuel a new generation of startups. Applications in January to Y Combinator, a startup school in Silicon Valley, were up fivefold on the previous year. Excitement is particularly strong in the buzzy field of ChatGPT-like “generative” artificial intelligence (AI), which uses complex algorithms and oodles of data to produce everything from essays to artworks (indeed, this is one area where big tech continues to hire enthusiastically).

下岗技术人员也为新一代初创企业注入新鲜血液。今年一月，位于硅谷的创业孵化器Y Combinator收到的申请数量同比增长了5倍。ChatGPT这类“生成式”人工智能领域正是时下的热门风口。“生成式”人工智能利用复杂算法和海量数据，生成各种各样的“产品”，如论文或艺术品。事实上，科技巨头也一直在该领域积极地招贤纳才。

Optimists hope that this technology will, like the smartphone before it, unlock a new wave of creative destruction, as entrepreneurs conjure up a variety of clever applications. The new AIs may in time mean even less need for, say, human marketers. But they could, like other breakthroughs before them, create entirely new job categories—not least in the tech industry itself.

乐天派希望，随着企业家“变出”五花八门的神奇应用程序，该项技术能和先前的智能手机一样，掀起新一波创造性颠覆之潮。有朝一日，新型AI甚至有可能取代市场营销人员的工作。但它们也能像先前的其他技术突破一样，创造出全新的工作类别——尤其是在科技行业本身。

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