Over hiring, not AI, behind recent tech industry redundancies

31 March 2026

Julian Fell, Teresa Tan, and Joshua Byrd, writing for writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC):

“It’s just gravity,” says George Double, a Sydney-based recruiter who has been working with several engineers who were laid off from Block. Block and Atlassian — another company that cited AI as justification for heavy lay-offs — were “bloated”, he says, and needed to downsize regardless of the impacts of AI. Both companies were paying well-above-average salaries for engineers and hired heavily during the COVID years.

Over hiring in recent years, leaving some companies overstaffed, may be the real reason companies including Atlassian, Amazon, and Block, have made large numbers of employees redundant.

Of course, no one wants to admit that, particularly to the workers facing retrenchment. Saying “advances in technology” sounds a whole lot better than “we should never have hired you.”

But then again…

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