Could the Tech Industry Layoffs Be a Silver Lining for the Quantum Industry Cloud?

I was recently talking with the CEO of a major quantum company about personnel recruitment and he said something that was initially quite surprising to me. He indicated that recruiting qualified classical engineers was more of a challenge for their company than recruiting quantum specialists! On further thought, that makes sense to me now. It turns out that an awful lot of the technology that goes into a quantum computer is classically based. These include activities like developing classical control electronics for controlling the qubits, creating graphical user interfaces, data base engineering, integrating a quantum computer with a classical processor for hybrid computing, job queuing algorithms, data analysis, and much, much more. The QED-C published the results of a survey of its members last year that looked at skills, job titles, and education requirements for the quantum industry and showed that a great many positions would not require any or little quantum related skills. Sure, there are some roles, like a Experimental Physicist or an Error Correction Scientist that would require advanced degrees related to quantum. But it's clear that a good staffing strategy for a growing quantum company is to have a mixture of non-quantum trained folks to work with the quantum specialists to bring their product to market.

According to tech layoff tracker website Layoffs.fyi, there have been over 200,000 tech industry layoffs in 2022 and 2023 so far from over 1,000 different companies. Some of the more notable layoffs with approximate number of people as as follows:

Like any new employee joining a company, it's likely that some training may be required. But the good news is that there is a lot of resources of resources, both online and short courses available that can provide a competent classical engineer with good enough training that would allow them to work productively with the quantum physicists. (Check out the list of resources we have on our EDUCATION page.)

So for those quantum companies in dire need of people to help them execute their plans, check out the option of hiring someone with a classical computing experience. Not only may you find it may be easier for these folks to become productive in your company than you thought, but they may also be able to bring their experience working at classical computing companies to bear and come up with creative solutions to the technical problems that come up in your company.

And for classical engineers either actively looking for a new job or just curious about whether to make a change, check out the resources available for learning about quantum and also check out the list of open positions that we post on the JOBS page of the Quantum Computing Report.

So although a lot of people have thought that workforce development might be a limiting factor to the growth of the quantum industry, perhaps it may not turn out to be as much of a limiting factor as originally thought. People are available. It's just a matter of providing them with enough training and matching them up with the right openings so they can make a contribution.

January 21, 2023