Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.

This week: Google fires hundreds of recruiters, and ARM gets a sky-high valuation.

1. Layoffs for the recruiters themselves

First up this week: Google’s hiring has slowed to such an extent that it has far too many in-house recruiters. Boo hoo?

Analysis: Don’t shed a tear at task shedding

I get it. Many reading this care little for the typical recruiter. All too often they seem like pointless brokers—adding no value to the process yet receiving a huge bonuses. But this news is the latest indication that DevOps jobs are harder to come by.

Louise Matsakis has the scoop: Google lays off hundreds on recruiting team

“Hard decision”
Google is laying off hundreds of people across its global recruiting team as hiring at the tech giant continues to slow. … Workers who were laid off began learning their roles had been eliminated earlier today, according to posts on social media.
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Google began reducing the speed of its hiring last year, after adding tens of thousands of workers in 2020 and 2021. … Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini said, … “In order to continue our important work to ensure we operate efficiently, we’ve made the hard decision to reduce the size of our recruiting team.”

Bring in the RecruitBot 4000. galaxytachyon explains:

How likely is it that this is because of AI taking over the jobs? Sift through resumes, contact candidates, schedule some interviews, connect the hiring manager to the candidate, even getting some extra information from the candidate via email or phone calls are all things an LLM can efficiently do. They may actually do it even better than a regular human, since they might “know” more about the role and the technical requirements than an average [recruiter].

AI recruiters—and AI developers, too. Here’s Qbertino:

I don’t expect those jobs to return. … After 23 years in IT I’m looking into a … career switch myself. Our industry is fully industrialized, custom coding is by now only for mostly totally broken legacy **** that will be replaced by SOA subscriptions within the next few years and what’s still left to code will be mostly done by AI quite soon I suspect.
…
Time to move on. It was an awesome ride but we’ve now finally built the bots that will replace us. Nice. This will spell more wealth for everyone in the long run even if we are out of cushy jobs with obscene salaries.

When Google catches a cold, do other DevOps shops sneeze? Not in gijames1225’s experience:

It’s weird being at a midsize company that has only accelerated hiring for engineers while the big players all go through these layoff cycles. The cynic in me sees them as token displays of fiscal responsibility being made for shareholders and a weird performativity of not wanting to be outdone by other tech giants. Another bit of me wonders about general productivity at these places if they can layoff so many people and nothing really appears to change (from a consumer perspective).

All of which makes this Anonymous Coward wonder:

I wonder what happens now to those who have threatened to quit or were reluctant to come in to physical offices.

Meanwhile, u/saracenraider has questions:

Do recruiters go through recruiters to get recruiting jobs? Are there specialist recruiters who focus on recruiting jobs? Are they the best recruiters as they know exactly what the recruiting job entails and so recognise recruiting talent in their recruiters?

2. ARM IPO is Today

It’s Thursday, September 14. This is the day Arm IPOs (again). Softbank is initially returning 10% of the company to the open market.

Analysis: Lean, mean, green machine

As I’ve said a few times recently, ARM chips are an increasing fixture in cloud and on-premises data centers. That’s especially true for those that value “performance per Watt.”

Leslie Picker and Kif Leswing: Arm prices IPO at $51 per share

“Chips for data centers”
Arm, the chip design firm that supplies core technology to companies including Apple and Nvidia, [is worth] over $54 billion at the $51 offer price. … The offering is at the top of Arm’s expected price range … a price-to-earnings multiple of about 104, based on profit in the latest fiscal year.
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Arm’s technology is used in 99% of mobile processors around the world. … Many of Arm’s most important customers, including Apple, Google, Nvidia, Samsung, AMD, Intel and [TSMC], said they would buy shares as part of the offering.
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Arm officials said the company … wants to design more chips for data centers and AI applications. It said it expects the total market for chip designs to be worth about $250 billion by 2025.

Cloud and other data centers are where the action is. Here are Dylan Patel, Myron Xie, Afzal Ahmad and Daniel Nishball:

Arm’s success can be attributed to its innovative architecture, flexible licensing model, and strong ecosystem. … The Arm ISA is the most ubiquitous instruction set in the world [including] cores tailored for data centers and the cloud. The Neoverse cores were first introduced in 2019 and they have seen adoption within hyperscalers, featuring in AWS Graviton and Nvidia Grace to name a few examples.
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Arm is even potentially going to offer data center CPU chiplets for their major data center customers such as Marvell, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta. These firms are designing a variety of chips, from CPUs to ASICs, but that doesn’t preclude them from utilizing an Arm based chiplet that is sold to them from Arm. This would dramatically reduce design costs—which is important as design costs are soaring.

And finally, Petersko sounds happy:

Finally! A tech IPO valuation that makes sense to me. It has been a while. The company makes something valuable, has a decent track record as a business, and turns a profit.

The Moral of the Story:
You only pass through this life once—you don’t come back for an encore.

—Elvis

You have been reading The Long View by Richi Jennings. You can contact him at @RiCHi, @richij or [email protected].

Image: Tobias Reich (@electerious) (via Unsplash; leveled and cropped)