THE CASE OF META, TWITTER AND AMAZON
The world of work has changed tremendously and layoffs seem to be the new season after the great recession. Mass layoffs have been a thing of the past, according to NetworkWorld. In the year 2015, tech companies like Microsoft, Blackberry and Sony laid off over 15,000 people to “refocus on profit”.
The economic times we are in show that the season of layoffs is upon us once again. A research by npr.org concludes that more than 35,000 tech workers across 72 companies have been laid off in the month of November alone. This adds up to the total of 120,000 tech jobs lost this year.
Research shows that the main reasons for layoffs is, they hired a lot of employees during the pandemic, when online usage had surged to an unprecedented peak. Considering offline life has picked up, tech companies have assessed that these new employees are an expense they cannot cater for.
Another reason for this is, continuous rise and fall of the economy. The uncertainty in the markets has made brands more reluctant to spend on digital ads. High interest rates have put an end to the cheap-money era of venture capital.
When META, Twitter and Amazon laid off workers, it caused a wave of shock and worry throughout the world. Twitters’ layoff seemed to be the most talked about. Yet, The New York Times reported Amazon to be the first tech company to be in preparation to lay off roughly 10,000 employees. They went further to talk about how the e-commerce giant previously put a hold on “new incremental hires” in its corporate workforce, according to a company statement.
A technical recruiter at Meta (META) told Yahoo Finance about her experience, saying: “I thought I’d be clear in this layoff, I didn’t think these layoffs would be to the scale that they are, or that I would be affected”. She was locked out of her computer, with access only to her work email. “I tried to go look at benefits,” the recruiter said. “I typed it in our search bar, and it wouldn’t let me in, saying I needed internal access.”
According to slate.com, the status of the internet growth is strong and tech companies won’t see the same growth they did in 2012 or 2002. Investors have recognized this and are increasingly demanding that tech companies focus on profits rather than growth. This has fueled most of the layoffs for tech companies.
For every person working in a tech company, it has been a difficult season of anxiety and uncertainty. A product marketing manager, who joined the company less than a year ago told YahooFinance. He said that working at Meta was usually “confusing and convoluted.” Profound nervousness has set in for him and his co-workers. Because the job security of employees who work in the tech industry is not guaranteed, every employee had stopped working at the news of the layoff.
“We all thought, well, some of us aren’t going to be here by Thursday, so work stopped. There’s no work going on at Meta this week at all,” the product manager told yahoo finance. As it stands now, Atkins, a research organization, is anticipating seeing more season of layoffs in the coming months. And it’s possible that we haven’t seen the last of cuts in Big Tech industries or Meta.
