Amidst the billions of dollars being invested in AI technology and the confidence that tech giants are heralding towards it, the lay off trend in #tech business continues in 2024.

This past March, dozens of companies laid off employees, struggling with challenging market conditions. While the losses that tech firms have suffered since the beginning of January have been many times less than previous years, curbing inflation and an improving economic picture are not enough to end the layoffs.

Below you’ll see a list of companies that laid off employees in March, some of which have permanently suspended operations, TechCrunch reports.

ChowNow

ChowNow has laid off 20% of its staff following the acquisition of sales platform Cuboh. This isn’t the first layoff for the company, which laid off 100 people in 2022.

Nintendo of America

The company everyone knows is restructuring its testing department, at the expense of the employees it’s made up of. A Nintendo spokesperson told Kotaku that the changes will put an end to some tasks, but will result in the creation of new full-time positions. However, whether the hopeful plans for employees will come to fruition remains to be seen.

Dell

Dell has reduced its global workforce by about 6,000 jobs, according to a 10-K filed with the SEC. The filing reveals that the company has cut 13,000 jobs over the past year.

Synctera

Synctera also makes the list of companies that have entered the lay off trend. A Fintech Business Weekly report said the layoffs affected 17 people, or about 15% of the company.

ShopBack

ShopBack has eliminated 195 positions in an effort to become more sustainable, CEO Henry Chan wrote in a blog post. The layoffs affect nearly a quarter of the company’s employees.

Airmeet

Airmeet has cut 20% of its total workforce in its second restructuring in the past year.

Chipper Cash

CEO Ham Serunjogi announced in a blog post that he has made another round of cuts affecting 20 employees.

Textio

Texito has reportedly made 16% of its staff redundant in a strategic move to support its Textio Lift product.

Stash

The company has laid off about 25% of its employees. According to Axios, the layoffs affect about 80 people.

Phantom Auto

Phantom Auto has ceased operations after failed attempts to secure new funding, TechCrunch reports. The remote driving startup, which laid off employees last year, employed just over 100 people.

IBM

IBM also made the list of companies that laid off employees in March. This time, the company laid off its marketing and communications workforce. Earlier, IBM announced a strategy to replace up to 8,000 jobs with artificial intelligence.

Inscribe.ai

Inscribe.ai has laid off just under 40% of its staff, the company confirmed to TechCrunch.

Turnitin

Turnitin is another company that laid off around 15 people earlier this year, following comments from CEO Chris Karen that the company would be able to cut 20% of its staff again thanks to artificial intelligence.

Sorare

Sorare has laid off 13% of the people working in its New York office. According to claims from a source via TechCrunch, the reason for this is that fantasy sports platform Web3 is focusing on its Paris headquarters.

Project Ronin

Project Ronin has carried out a mass layoff that has affected around 150 employees. The reason for it is the winding down of the company.

“The developer skills gap has been well-documented, but with so many tech companies forced into making redundancies across the business, the requirement for developer talent is as urgent as ever,” said JuhaPekka Niemi, senior vice president of product management at Qt Group.

“Despite an uncertain economic market, companies are still looking for – and struggling to recruit – developer talent”, he continued.

The company clarified that numerous redundancies were documented in 2023, attributing many layoffs to ongoing re-prioritization initiatives. As an illustration, a technology company, despite recording 27,410 redundancies, retained 5,437 developer positions on its website as of November 15.

The report asserts that to address the skills gap, companies must “enhance their design and development processes and enhance efficiency.” Additionally, Qt Group examined the impact of AI, noting that despite the current enthusiasm for AI, the demand for developers remains high due to their crucial role in fostering innovation and creativity.

According to Bloomberg’s latest data, more than 700 employees are prepared to leave if the fired Sam Altman and Greg Brockman are not returned to their positions at the company.

CTO Mira Murati, who briefly took over the leadership role over the weekend, stressed at X that “OpenAI is nothing without its people.”

Altman and Brockman are said to have been involved in key discussions with the OpenAI board over the weekend in a bid to win back their positions. However, those talks did not result in a favorable outcome for the former CEO and chairman. Late on Sunday evening, it was revealed that the board had chosen to appoint former Twitch CEO Emmett Shearer as interim CEO of OpenAI, developer of the viral artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT.

Shear, the co-founder of Twitch, served as the company’s CEO until March of this year. In a surprising move, he resigned just before a significant round of layoffs, and Twitch experienced another round of layoffs last month.

Concurrently, the unexpected leadership shift at OpenAI has raised eyebrows, given Altman’s prominent role as the face of generative AI and his pivotal contribution to transitioning the AI firm from a non-profit organization to a commercially viable entity.

It’s worth noting that Altman’s departure from the company was reportedly due to a perceived lack of transparency in his communications, as reported by the media. Allegedly, he clashed with board members who expressed concerns about the pace of his initiatives, particularly regarding the safety implications of a technology that, if unregulated, could produce content with potential harm to the public. Shear’s appointment at OpenAI follows Altman’s dismissal on Friday, with the board citing a lack of “consistent candor in his communications.”

Will Sam Altman be brought back or will OpenAI remain uncompromising in its decision? Keep an eye out for details.

One of the important things that every novice .NET developer needs to know is that the Framework Class Library (FCL) and language interoperability are the most important features.

Today we introduce you to some useful tips, KnowledgeHut presents us and which will strengthen your qualities and skills as a .NET professional.

The Tips Every .NET Developer Needs

Know the Basics
If you aspire to be a .NET developer, the fundamental concepts of .NET Core, .NET Standard, .NET Framework, and Xamarin.Mono should be on your tips. C# is an excellent, elegant and expressive programming language and the best friend of .NET developers.

Important things to note and skills to master in C# are: Variables, Conditionals, Loops, Fields and properties, Data types, Inheritance, Objects, LINQ, Classes, Methods, Encapsulation, Interfaces, Polymorphism.

Expand your knowledge
Building a good career as a .NET developer requires flexibility. Having a generic skill set adds no value to individual growth and brings no advantages when you’re at a job interview, for example, and have to choose between you and another candidate. Therefore, additional skills that complement your .NET experience are preferred, some of which Up-to-Date knowledge, Experience With CI/CD Pipelines, Engagement.

.NET developer skills
Every employer wants a .NET developer who has experience in C#, ASP.Net, ASP.Net Web API, REST API/JSON, LINQ, SQL, and relational databases. Additional skills that employers require are OOD, Agile, multithreading, performance tuning, good code organization skills and design patterns.

Basic programming skills
Knowing the basic C# programming concepts are extremely important. For example, what is the use of conditional operators? What is the use of loops? These basic code and syntax knowledge are the basic requirements for any DOTNET developer, whether amateur or expert.

C# is an object-oriented multi-paradigm language, so knowledge of OOPS concepts and information about their implementation are useful in developing websites, apps, mobile devices and games.

Tools for productivity
It would hardly surprise you if we told you that productivity is key. That’s why it’s crucial to have a thorough knowledge of the tools used for code optimization, such as JustCode, Resharper, or for code migration – .Net Portability Analyser, which will help you with any task, even when you’re in a period of unproductivity.

More than a third of respondents (37.5%) said they will continue to have trouble finding qualified developers in 2023, with DevOps Engineer, Data Analytics Developer and IT Security Engineer identified as the most difficult jobs to fill.

Although nearly all developers (88.8%) work with a designer or team of designers, almost half of a developer’s time (43.4%) is spent on application programming, the survey found. The lack of skilled developers is addressed by using tools with little or no programming in three-quarters (76.8%) of organizations.

“The industry continues to face difficulty filling positions for skilled software developers as we race to digitize the business world. Organizations are turning to new solutions, such as low-code/no-code tools that require little or no upfront manual coding, to address skills gaps, solve problems and save money.”

states Casey McGuigan, product manager for Reveal and Slingshot at Infragistics.

Other key issues in 2023 are communication and collaboration difficulties in remote and hybrid teams. Now that many organizations have moved to remote/hybrid teams and reduced their physical presence, with only 18.6% of software developers and IT professionals working entirely on-site, difficulties arise in communicating and collaborating with team members in the new digital environment.

“The remote/hybrid workplace has resulted in a myriad of issues as software developers installed new online collaboration tools and sought ways to improve productivity,”

explained McGuigan.

“This is where all-in-one digital workplace tools benefit organisations by eliminating time consuming app switching, incorporating project and task management, content management, collaboration, data analytics, and data catalogue capabilities, allowing teams to manage workloads more intelligently, stay on top of deadlines, and make smarter business decisions that are backed up by hard facts”,

he continued.

The Reveal survey found that software developers plan to make better use of their resources in 2023 by improving project management (30%), improving collaboration between designers and developers (30%), using software that will work for citizen developers (27%), using remote staff (25%), and incorporating a data/analytics catalog (25%).

Other major challenges in 2023 will be the inability to keep up with innovations in developer tools (27.7%), difficulties with third-party integration (26.70%), difficulties in workload management (26.2%), security threats (26.10%), project management (26.10%), and customer expectations that are too high (26%).

“Embedded analytics help end users uncover insights without the help of data analytics experts,”

said McGuigan.

“More and more organizations will be embracing embedded analytics tools in 2023 because they are the key to improving productivity, increasing sales/revenue, understanding business problems and making better business decisions”,

he continued.

The data shows that there is a slight decrease in revenue growth, with only 18.8% of respondents reporting an increase in revenue in 2022 compared to 25% in 2021. The percentage of developers taking on new projects has dropped slightly in 2022, with 33.3% reporting new ventures, compared to 36.22% in 2021. Only a quarter (25%) have expanded into new markets, down 8% from the previous year. Requests for proposals also declined in 2022, down 12% from 2021.

There are 135 vacancies in Berlin and 118 in London, with just over half of all vacancies in both capitals. Munich and Paris rank third and fourth respectively, Zurich 12 positions, Frankfurt 11, Stockholm and Amsterdam 8 and Barcelona and Cologne complete the top 10 with 7 positions.

It’s probably no surprise to anyone that the US accounts for 55.7% of all vacancies in the VC world, with Germany, the UK and France taking the No. 2, 3 and 4 spots. And Australia ranks fifth with 35 jobs on offer, despite its domestic VC market being just 10% of Europe’s in terms of funding in Q4 2022.

The job market over the past year was filled with junior (intern and/or analyst) and mid-level (associate/investment manager) opportunities, which accounted for 38.6% and 43.1%, respectively. Senior level positions (director/partner), the venture capital job market in 2022 saw only 18.3% of positions advertised or available.

Kordowski also notes that the high percentage of entry-level positions “may be due to the high turnover of such opportunities, with some venture capital firms often hiring new interns or analysts every 3-6 months.”

“Due to the private nature of some hiring processes in VC, it was not possible to gather information from every VC firm.”

he said

Kordovsky’s data includes 1,407 job postings from 805 venture capital firms in 35 countries that are posted on two publicly available venture capital-related job boards, Startup&VC and John Gannon Blog.

Philips CEO Roy Jacobs said that due to significant operational challenges, the company is not extracting the full value of its business and therefore is having to take drastic measures.

The move is in conjunction with the company’s new growth strategy, which, among a number of actions and transformations, identifies the Philips Innovation Centre in Eindhoven as a hub for breakthrough innovation.

However, in order to become a leading company in healthcare technology, the new strategy envisages doubling the company’s efforts in the image-guided therapy, monitoring, ultrasound and personal health business segments, expanding the enterprise informatics business segment, improving the imaging business and rebuilding the sleep and respiratory care business segment.

According to Philips, to lead these segments, it is shifting 90% of its R&D resources to these businesses, up 20% from 2022.

Philips, which employs about 77,000 people, has suffered losses of 1.53 billion euros ($1.66 billion) in 2022. Meanwhile, the company generated total sales of 17.8 billion euros last year.

Roy Jacobs added that the job cuts “will put Philips on a progressive path to value creation with sustainable impact to achieve mid-single digit comparable sales growth.”

The hardest hits are expected to fall at the head office in Amsterdam and in the town of Best in the province of North Brabant, where the company’s innovation centre is located.

The fund struggled in the final two months. In November and December the company dropped 8% and 10.7%, respectively. That erased a 13% gain that it had built through the first 10 months of the year.

It’s just the third annual loss in the hedge fund’s two-decade history. It declined 15% in 2016 and 26% in 2008.

Last month, Tiger Global told clients in a letter that it’s opening up both funds to a limited amount of capital from existing investors to bolster positions in stocks that underperformed. The firm said in the letter:

“We are excited by the opportunities we see today and intend to continue playing offense.”

The funds started accepting fresh cash at the beginning of January after being closed to new money for years.

One of the stocks that probably hurt results is Beijing-based retail giant JD.com Inc. It tumbled 20% last year amid a regulatory crackdown in China. The stock was Tiger Global’s second-biggest US equity position as of Sept. 30.

Another top holding, DocuSign Inc., plunged 31%. Last month, the e-signature company provided a revenue forecast that missed Wall Street estimates. It stoked concerns that growth will slow after a pandemic-fueled surge in demand.

Norway is seeking to become the first nation to end the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2025.  Oil-producing countries exempt battery electric vehicles (BEVs) from taxes imposed on rivals using internal combustion engines (ICE).

Tesla grabbed an 11.5 per cent share of the overall car market, making it to the first positions for the first time on a full-year basis ahead of Germany’s Volkswagen with 9.4 per cent.

The company delivered more than 308,000 vehicles in the fourth quarter and saw deliveries surge about 87 per cent. In October, the electric-vehicle maker topped $1 trillion in market cap for the first time.

Dorsey co-founded Twitter in 2006, and served as CEO until 2008. He occupied various other positions at the company, including chairman and executive chairman before returning to the CEO role in 2015. In a statement posted on his Twitter account Dorsey said:

“I’ve decided to leave Twitter because I believe the company is ready to move on from its founders.”

Parag Agrawal, the company’s chief technology officer, will take over from Dorsey,  the company announced.

Twitter stock jumped 3 per cent on the news.

The ex CEO will remain a member of the Board until his term expires at the 2022 meeting of stockholders, the company said.