If we were to believe the story published in The Washington Post on February 2, 2023… written by By Gerrit De Vynck, Rachel Lerman and Julian Mark… with the headline: “Lackluster earnings reports show Big Tech’s golden age is fading…”
…we might think Big Tech’s golden age is fading.
Tech companies have cut almost 80,000 employees in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area since the beginning of 2022, according to layoff tracking website layoffs.fyi
Who knew there was a ‘layoff tracking’ website, totally dedicated to bad news? You would almost think they were a newspaper.
But what I want to know is, why did it take three people — Gerrit De Vynck, Rachel Lerman and Julian Mark — to write the Washington Post article?
Here in small-town Pagosa Springs, the Daily Post manages to turn out several articles a day, each written by a single person, or else plagiarized by a single person. And that’s in a town where hardly anything ever happens.
But in a big cosmopolitan city like Washington DC, with all their advanced technology — including probably brand new computers, and new Keurig K150 coffee machines in the break room — do they really need three reporters to steal a few numbers off a ‘layoff tracking website’?
And if that wasn’t bad enough, the Washington Post article concludes with this information:
Naomi Nix and Faiz Siddiqui contributed to this report.
So, like, five people… to write one lousy news article?
If that’s how all these big companies are operating — Google (12,000 laid off) and Microsoft (10,000 laid off) and Facebook (11,000 laid off) and Amazon (18,000 laid off) — I say, “Well, no wonder, guys. You’re paying five people to do the job we do in Pagosa with one person!”
Not that I am cold-hearted. I’m sympathetic to those thousands of high tech employees who were laid off from their $250,000-a-year jobs. (With paid health insurance. And paid vacations. And a company car. And free lunches, and workout rooms, and massages.)
Now that I think about it, I guess I’m not actually very sympathetic. I don’t even get a paid lunch break.
So maybe I am cold-hearted.
(My ex-wife Darlene would love to read that last sentence, if she ever stooped to read any of my columns.)
But maybe I’m also biting the hand that feeds me. Fact is, without the geeks who wrote the code that runs the Daily Post servers, and the coders who created our content management system, and the programmers who created Photoshop and Microsoft Word and Google… and who make sure my email arrives every morning (and all through the day)… and who cause my smartphone to operate whenever it happens to want to operate…
Without all of those high tech people — thousands of high tech people — I wouldn’t even have a life. I would still be washing cars in Albuquerque. Except even that’s become pretty much automated. Which is why I was laid off and had to become a humor writer, totally at the mercy of Big Tech.
Now their golden age is fading, they tell us.
I can see them now. Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai, and the rest of the Big Tech gurus, riding off into the sunset.
They’re wearing cowboys hats.
A lonesome guitar is strumming, and Brad Paisley is singing ‘Whiskey Lullaby’.
I have no idea why they’re wearing cowboy hats. It’s just a weird world we live in.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.