2016 layoffs, What's next!

A massive pink slip parade this year, should one Wall Street analyst's prediction of more than 260,000 tech layoffs in 2016 come true

10 tech companies are likely to take the largest swipe of the ax to their workforce, based on one or more of these four factors:

• Technology shift. "Cloud and mobile technologies have increased the productivity of an employee exponentially," Chowdhry said in an interview with InformationWeek. "What this means is the number of employees needed to do a certain type of job is less."
• Micro-services such as cloud computing improving IT efficiency. The term "micro-services" means software that can run on a fraction of the hardware that was previously needed by a customer, he said. Cloud services like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft's Azure are examples.
• Integrating technology no longer valued. "Under the old world, one company would make the servers, another company would make the network, and another company would make the apps. This was an on-premises company. So, you had to hire a lot of people to configure middleware or work with the database. A lot of people had to manage the backend processes. But when you go the cloud, you don't need these backend employees," Chowdhry said.
• Consumer behavioral shift. When consumers shift to a new preferred website, advertisers will follow them, he noted. As a result, advertising-dependent websites are hurt.