文章来源：《经济学人》Mar 27th 2023 期 Business 栏目 The sack of Silicon Valley

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.

要了解硅谷近几个月来基调的转变，只需看看马克·扎克伯格在今年2月宣布2023年将是“效率年”就行了。这种语言很难让人兴奋，除非你是接收端的员工。3月14日，扎克伯格经营的科技巨头Meta宣布将在去年11月裁员1.1万人的基础上再裁员1万人。

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.

Meta并非个例。3月20日，另一家科技巨头亚马逊宣布将在已经裁掉1.8万白领员工的基础上，再裁掉9000名员工。根据数据提供商Crunchbase的数据，今年到目前为止，美国科技公司已经宣布裁员11.8万人，而去年已经裁员14万人。

Investors have cheered tech’s newfound cost consciousness. The technology heavy NASDAQ index is up by 17% from its recent low point in late December. The companies are hearing the market’s message loud and clear. 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.

投资者对科技公司新发现的成本意识表示欢迎。以科技股为主的纳斯达克指数较去年12月底的近期低点上涨了17%。这些公司响亮而清晰地听到了市场的信息。3月24日，商业软件公司Salesforce的首席运营官暗示，该公司将在1月份宣布裁员8000人的基础上，再裁员8000人。

They have a way to go: 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.

他们还有很长的路要走:自2022年初以来解雇的员工只占美国科技行业劳动力的6%。由于科技公司在整个2022年都在继续招聘，裁员才刚刚开始减少整个行业的就业人数(见图1)。相比之下，从21世纪初互联网繁荣的顶峰到2003年底的低谷，美国科技行业的整体劳动力下降了23%，即68.5万个工作岗位。

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?

然而，最近大范围、深层次的裁员，足以引起两个问题。首先，谁将被解雇? 第二，被裁的员工都去哪里了?

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).

在2020年春季疫情最严重时期到2023年初就业达到峰值期间，科技行业增加了约100万名员工。仅仅是雇佣这些数字就需要雇佣大量的招聘人员; 根据猎头的经验，一个招聘人员一年可以雇佣25名新员工。许多这样的招聘人员现在可能是供过于求的。

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(一个行业组织)的蒂姆·赫伯特说，到目前为止，大多数技术人员本身都没有受到影响。相反，裁员主要集中在销售和招聘等业务部门。近年来，作为科技行业就业人数的一部分，这一比例稳步增长，这是膨胀的迹象(见图2)。

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.

但专家们也未能幸免。作为裁员的一部分，Meta将在4月份重组其技术部门。让有才华的科技员工回归社会，对于其他正在努力进行数字化重塑的行业来说，可能是一件好事。多年来，工业产品等平淡无奇的行业一直难以与科技行业争夺人才。现在他们正在突袭。美国拖拉机制造商约翰迪尔一直在抢夺被解雇的技术员工，以帮助其制造更智能的农业机械。去年，该公司在德克萨斯州蓬勃发展的科技中心奥斯汀开设了办事处。越来越关注软件的汽车制造商也渴望科技人才。银行、健康保险公司和零售商也是如此。

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 artworkss—so much so that even big tech continues to hire enthusiastically in the area (see earlier article).

一些被解雇的技术人员也在为新一代创业公司提供动力。今年1月，硅谷创业孵化器Y Combinator的申请人数较前一年增长了5倍。在像ChatGPT一样的“生成式”人工智能这一热门领域，人们的兴奋情绪尤其强烈。生成式AI使用复杂的算法和大量数据来生成从论文到艺术品的所有东西，因此，即使是大型科技公司也在该领域热情地招聘。。

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.

乐观主义者希望这项技术能像之前的智能手机一样，随着企业家们想出各种聪明的应用程序，开启一波新的创造性破坏浪潮。随着时间的推移，新的人工智能可能意味着对人类营销人员的需求会更少。但它们可以像之前的其他突破一样，创造全新的工作类别，尤其是在科技行业本身。