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Is ‘silent firing’ the tech industry’s new headache amid growing influence of AI?

Posted on by angelo
Is ‘silent firing’ the tech industry’s new headache amid growing influence of AI?

New Delhi: With the advent of AI, the technology industry has been deeply affected by massive layoffs and increased job cuts. In 2024, in just 6 months, nearly 95,000 people have already received the pink coupon. While not all job cuts are the result of AI, the majority of job cuts are expected due to the advent of AI.

Last year, in 2023, there was a whopping 59% increase in job cuts compared to the previous year. Tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta have already opened the door to thousands of employers this year. These continued job cuts add to the enormous unemployment plaguing countries where tech companies are the main employers of such a vast workforce.

Chart: Tech layoffs by sector (retail and consumer goods particularly high in 2022 and 2023, transportation particularly high in 2024)

What are “silent layoffs” in the IT sector?

As the Indian IT sector is gripped by huge job cuts, a silent killer is taking hold in the Indian IT sector: the phenomenon of ‘silent layoffs’. Silent dismissal is a new form of phenomenon in which employees are quietly pressured to resign from the company under various pretexts. Almost all resignations offered to the company are made without any official announcement.

Interestingly, the whole process of handing in the resignation is interesting in itself! First, the employee is asked to find a suitable job within a given time frame, usually 30 days. If they fail to find a position suited to their field of work, they risk finding the pink slip in their hands.

This “silent dismissal” process has become cancerous for the tech world. According to the nonprofit AIITEU, nearly 20,000 tech employees have been victims of this reckless form of job elimination. These alarming rates of layoffs raise questions about the applicability of AI in a labor-intensive market, but they also highlight the structural functionality of these large companies seeking to generate ever more profits .