Tech Sector Layoffs
Source：New York Times
From：Taiwan Trade Center, Chicago
Update Time：2022/11/24
In entering the final months of 2022, the tech sector has seen massive rounds of layoffs. Meta, Lyft, Twitter, to name a few, have all laid off substantial portions of their workforce.
Meta, who first announced a hiring freeze, soon escalated to mass layoffs. More than 11,000 people, roughly 13% of the workforce, were cut from the company. Mark Zuckerberg, said Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, had experienced extreme growth during the pandemic, and as the boom in online commerce ebbed this year, they struggled to sustain the growth they had seen since 2020.
Similarly, across the industry, Twitter, Stripe, and Lyft all cut thousands of workers within the last month. Amazon announced a hiring freeze for its corporate work force.
All of these layoffs are a reflection of the current US economy. Tech Companies, in many ways, have led the way for the US economy over the past decade, providing a lift to the stock market during the pandemic. However, it appears that lift may have come at a cost, a cost the American economy will need to settle.
In fact, Lyft cited their layoffs were to combat “a probably recession sometime in the next year.” It’s founders said the company “is not immune to the reality of inflation and a slowing economy,” meaning they must cut costs in the face of higher spending and decreased demand.
Across the sector these choices have been made to combat a slow, mostly flat last quarter for these tech companies. Microsoft, while not engaging in wide spread layoffs, echoed this sentiment by telling investors that new hires in this quarter “should be minimal.” Similarly Alphabet, which owns Google and YouTube, also said that in this quarter it would hire fewer than half the number of people it added in the third quarter.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/technology/tech-companies-hiring-freeze-job-cuts.html