Layoffs in big tech firms like Twitter, Meta, Amazon are expected to get worse early next year as it surpasses great recession levels.
The last recession vs now
The world went through the Great Recession through 2008-2009 that began with Lehman Brothers collapse.
Back then tech firms laid off about 65,000 employees, and a similar number of workers lost their livelihoods in 2009.
By comparison, 965 tech companies have laid off more than 150,000 employees this year globally.
Unfortunately, this is not going to slow down any time soon.
Why isn’t this slowing down?
Layoffs in tech are set to worsen early next year amid ongoing global macroeconomic conditions.
A MarketWatch report says that these layoffs are part of a strategy by tech firms to maintain viability through 2023 and beyond.
Data from layoffs.fyi, a crowdsourced database of tech layoffs, says that 1,495 tech companies have sacked 246,267 employees since the onset of Covid-19.
2022 has been the worst year for the tech sector and early 2023 is expected to be even worse.
Depressing figures
As of mid-November, more than 73,000 workers in the US tech sector have been laid off in mass-level job cuts led by companies like Meta, Twitter, Salesforce, Netflix, Cisco, Roku, and others.
In India, over 17,000 tech employees have been shown the door.
Amazon and PC and printer major HP Inc are set to lay off more than 20,000 and up to 6,000 employees in days to come, respectively.
Cisco has started slashing nearly 4,000 jobs globally.
Google is also on the bandwagon with supposed plans for mass job cuts early next year.
No job security assurance
CEO Sundar Pichai has reportedly offered no assurance to its employees that it won’t happen.
Pichai said “it’s really tough to predict the future, so unfortunately, I can’t honestly sit here and make forward-looking commitments”.
He said that the company is trying hard to “make important decisions, be disciplined, prioritise where we can, rationalise where we can, so that we are set up to better weather the storm, regardless of what’s ahead.
I think that’s what we should focus on and try and do our best.”
