There was a massive shortage of engineers only a few months ago. I know not all these high tech workers are engineers, but have there been follow up reports on whether these laid off high tech workers are easily finding jobs at other companies? If that is the case, a rotation of high tech workers to other companies certainly isn't a bad thing.
Anecdotally, my company laid off 15% of its workforce last June, and then since then another 15% have quit. The layoffs were disproportionately outside of the engineering teams (e.g. HR, marketing, finance, customer service, business development, IT, legal, etc.) but basically everyone found jobs elsewhere pretty quickly, whether in other tech companies or in the non-tech sector. The quitters were spread more evenly across the company, but also found new jobs with little issue.
If engineers are getting laid off, they almost certainly will be snatched up quickly by other companies, tech or not. People working in other departments will also likely find jobs quickly, just not as quickly. This is why I'm not too worried about the tech layoffs; it's more a symptom of overexpansion, and on top of that, the tech sector represents a much smaller portion of the workforce than it does economic activity (not to downplay how much getting laid off sucks and how moronic so many tech leaders are). When layoffs start hitting the traditional economy, then i'll be more worried.
Right now, there just seems to be a lot of churn in the labor market worldwide. Combined with demographic trends, I don't see this shortage letting up soon, even if a minor recession occurs.
