In the first half of the year, we have been hearing and reading that there are considerable redundancies in the IT sector, that everyone is downsizing, and that there may not be a need for IT workers in the future. The articles even cited one or two large employers as examples of thousands of redundancies. At some companies, there were even forced retirements.
At Codecool, we see the market differently. The term “forced retirement” surprises us, as it is not common for programmers to “age out” prematurely in the IT sector. However, before we formulate a firm opinion, we would like to examine the facts and figures on the market more closely.
In the first five months of 2024, 110 companies announced redundancies (immediate or due during 2024), totaling 71,000 employees, according to official data. This is worth comparing with the 191 thousand redundancies in 2023 for the whole year. Thus, the pace of redundancies has already slowed down at the beginning of 2024, and we can return to the trend of 2022 (93 thousand redundancies over the whole year)
Looking at the first five months of 2024, we see that the top 19 of the 110 companies account for the vast majority of all layoffs: 61,000 workers were accounted for by announcements from companies such as Dell, IBM, Tesla, Paypal, etc. If we look at the reasons given by the 110 companies for the layoffs, the top three reasons are as follows:
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