It’s been a brutal couple of months for Silicon Valley…
Amazon has fired 18,000 employees, Facebook’s Meta axed 11,000, and Twitter has cut 3,700. And the trend has continued to spread — Microsoft is nixing 10,000, IBM is eliminating 3,900, and Salesforce is sluffing 7,000.
It’s become an uncertain moment in Silicon Valley as these tech giants grapple with the realities of our new economy.
But it’s not all bad news. What’s a loss for a tech is a gain for a gain for other rapidly-growing sectors of the market who have yet to find the talent they need.
These tech workers are already getting job offers…
Jaguar Land Rover wants to hire a full 800 of these exiting Silicon Valley programmers, saying they’re the perfect fit for the future of the company.
Jaguar wants to be fully electric by 2024 — and they’re overhauling every aspect of their operation to make it happen.
Their official statement put it this way:
“Our digital transformation journey is well underway but being able to recruit highly skilled digital workers is an important next step.”
Car companies are beginning to look a lot more like tech companies.
The EV revolution is truly a revolution.
Over the next three years, car companies are going to look very different.
Forget your image of Detroit executives wearing suits and sitting in giant boardrooms. A programmer wearing sandals is much better description. And the future is going to follow that lead.
Tesla has increased its headcount 29% over the course of the past year, adding 29,000 at the end of 2022. It now employs a total of 127,855 people — and is a notably tech-led environment.
It’s worth noting that Apple, which is in the process of building an EV of its own, is one of the only tech giants to not cut back on its staff. It can be argued that it’s the growth calculus of EVs that’s kept its staffing levels intact.
And then there’s Detroit itself. GMC has completely overhauled its Detroit Hamtramck plant and rename it Factory Zero, since it’s dedicated entirely to EVs. It’s the most high-tech plant Detroit has built to date, and it’ll move GMC closer to its stated goal of a zero-emissions assembly line.
This next-generation factory will be staffed by a tech-focused workforce that’s a lot more focused on sensors and screens rather than grease and crankshafts.
And so far, they have yet to fill their ranks. As Business Insider put it:
“While tech sheds thousands of jobs, automakers are desperate for workers.”
It’s not for a lack of trying. The challenge has been the size and scale of this paradigm shift.
One of Tesla’s former Gigafactory engineering managers said in a recent interview:
“There is a dearth of real technical talent in these industries.”
They need talent, and they need it in numbers.
According to the World Economic Forum, EVs and the EV battery supply chain will create a total of 10 million new jobs worldwide by 2030.
So as Big Tech slims their research parks, automakers are more than happy to hand those same workers a fat job offer.
And here’s the real point for us as investors: it’s one more sign that the drive for EVs is here to stay — and that it’s filling the void left of yesterday’s tech dreams.
