Difficulties in the IT sector and mass layoffs faced by employees in this industry in the past months are no longer a reality only in America - the wave of layoffs also flooded Serbia. One of the many companies that had to fire 177 of its programmers is Quantox from Čačany. writes OzonPress.
For months, tech giants like Microsoft and Meta have been laying off their workers en masse, but at first, the citizens of Serbia weren't overly worried, because it was happening "somewhere far away". Now the situation is completely different, so not even workers in the IT sector here are safe from sudden dismissal.
As many as 177 workers, specifically programmers, have lost their jobs, and this was confirmed by director Vuk Popović for Nova.rs.
In June of last year, when the cryptocurrency market first faced problems, Quantox lost two of its biggest clients.
"At that moment, we are left with exactly 177 people on the bench," says Popović.
By the way, bench workers are those who are officially employed and paid, but there are no projects or jobs in which they, in their companies, could participate.
In the beginning, Popović was sure that he would soon be able to employ all those people, who are otherwise "strong", that is, they have many years of experience in the business.
Indebtedness and dismissals
However, months passed, but there was no success. The company borrowed more and more, and after 10 months, they realized that they could no longer do so. They had to lay off workers.
"We did it, but we didn't want to." We fought to keep those people," says Popović for our portal.
Popovic decided to publish all this on Linkedin, in order to help people who lost their jobs to find a new job.
However, the director of Quantox says that the company has "sorted itself out", and that they already need new people.
As Nova.rs already wrote, the global company HTEC Group, which also operates in Serbia, had to reduce the number of employees. 200 workers lost their jobs.
Already at the end of last year, the giants of technology companies, such as Meta, Microsoft, Apple and Google, started massively laying off their workers.
For example, e-commerce giant Amazon suddenly laid off 18.000 workers to reduce operating costs, writes ozonpress.net.
It all started in 2020, with the coronavirus pandemic, when people were in "lock down", closed in their homes, so interest in social networks and online shopping grew, and in order to take advantage of such attendance, large companies began to aggressively they hire new workers, so Meta, for example, hired 40.000 new workers.
Two years later, in November 2022, 11.000 people lost their jobs in this company alone.
At the global level, since the beginning of the year, around 190.000 people have been laid off from the IT sector, and in Serbia, only during the first two months of 2023, the same number of people remained without work as during the entire previous period.
I.Đ./Ozonpress.net
