In what has practically turned into an annual sign of spring,
IBM
rained layoff notices down on its tech workforce in late March and again in April. According to waves of anecdotal reports posted online at
TheLayoff.com
and
Watching IBM
, workers in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands were hit starting March 29 with 90 days’ notice.

This time, it wasn’t just workers over 50 years old who were targeted (though the bulk of reports did seem to come from people in that age group); many in their 40s reported getting notices as well. And a few relatively new hires indicated that they, also, were hit by the April cuts; one has to wonder if this broader swing of the ax was in reaction to the ProPublica/Mother Jones report that past IBM layoffs overwhelmingly targeted older workers.

The size of IBM’s 2018 layoffs are hard to determine.
As usual, IBM made no official announcement, and, when contacted by
The Register
, did not address the layoffs directly, but said

that it had just announced a plan with French president Emmanuel Macron to open a new artificial intelligence research center in France that will create 400 new jobs.

After past layoffs, IBM typically made a statement about workforce rebalancing to focus on Watson, cloud, and analytics. That’s not likely to happen this time;

cuts hit those operations

as well.

Most other companies announce layoffs before they happen. The following is not by any means a comprehensive list of those announcements made so far in 2018, but includes the major layoffs at tech companies and a snapshot of a few that are smaller, but still significant:

• 
  Qualcomm
  
  this month announced that in June it will lay off
  1,231
  employees in San Diego and 269 in Silicon Valley.

• 
  Sigma Designs
  , based in Fremont, announced in January that it would lay off
  300
  out of 416 employees in its smart television and set top box operations as it sells off its various businesses.

• 
  GoPro
  in January announced plans to cut
  254
  staff members, mostly engineers working on drones.

• 
  Intel
  
  
  this month announced that it is shutting down its New Devices Group. The team had about
  200
  employees; no word on how many will be moved to other jobs in the corporation, but Intel has said there will be some layoffs.

• 
  Snap
  in March confirmed rumors of layoffs, indicating it was cutting
  120
  -plus engineers. Later that month, the company reported that 100 sales jobs were also being eliminated.

• 
  
  Pandora
  
  
  
  indicated in January that it will cut its workforce by five percent; that’s over
  100
  employees. It’s not clear how many tech jobs were affected.

• 
  Gigamon
  
  
  in February announced it was going to cut
  74
  staff members by the end of June, including hardware and software engineers as well as human resources professionals.

• 
  Lenovo
  
  
  cut
  200
  employees from its Motorola smartphone team in Chicago—that’s nearly half the group.
  HTC
  
  also cut its U.S. smartphone operations in Bellevue and Seattle by between a few dozen to
  100
  people, according to
  Digital Trends
  .
  

• And finally, a relatively small cut with perhaps an outsize significance: cloud-software company
  Lanetix
  , based in San Francisco, in January cut
  14
  software engineers—10 days after employees filed for union representation. The union, the Communications Workers of America, has submitted a complaint to the National Labor Relations Board.

It’s not all news about job cuts. By sheer numbers, announcements of hiring pushes dwarfed announcements of cuts.

• 
  Facebook
  in March announced that it would be hiring
  5,000
  cybersecurity professionals by year end—at least, it intends to try. Software engineers who specialize in cybersecurity are generally in high demand and short supply.

• 
  Apple
  is throwing a lot of resources at making Siri more intelligent. According to Thinknum Media
  , the company in March was recruiting for
  161
  Siri-related jobs, 154 of them in software engineering. The rest were listed as infrastructure engineers, machine learning engineers, and natural language processing engineers. It’s also beefing up hardware engineering jobs in general, according to Thinknum, and as of February was actively recruiting for
  1,198
  positions.

• 
  Amazon
  aims to make Alexa smarter as well, recruiting
  
  1,100
  engineers in India to work on speech and language data processing and
  125
  in Pittsburgh. The company is also listing nearly
  300
  job openings at its Silicon Valley R&D operation, many of them in robotics, leading Bloomberg to speculate that the company is ramping up efforts to build a domestic robot.

• Meanwhile,
  Spotify
  has been recruiting hardware and manufacturing engineers, according to The Guardian
  . The company is only advertising a couple of positions, but the move, said The Guardian, indicates that it will likely soon have its own streaming music and home control product to compete with Amazon’s Echo and Apple’s HomePod.

• Outside of the U.S.,
  BT
  
  announced that it will add
  3,000
  engineering jobs in an effort to upgrade the United Kingdom to gigabit speed internet. 
  

• Irish semiconductor company
  DecaWave
  
  indicated that it will add
  100
  jobs around the world; that triples its workforce.