Tech jobs: The endless buffet starts to run out
“Along with stock options, cruise ship– worthy buffets, free shuttle buses, and on-site dry cleaning,” rock-solid job security used to be a distinguishing perk of employment in Silicon Valley, said Antonia Mufarech and Drake Bennett in Bloomberg Businessweek. But consecutive years of large layoffs by prominent tech companies—like Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Zoom— have left “a sense of unease” throughout the industry. “So far this year, over 32,000 tech workers have lost their jobs, according to Layoffs.fyi.” In the grand scheme of things, it’s a meager figure. Overall U.S. employment grew by 353,000 in January, and the tech industry actually added 18,000 workers. “Still, the latest round of cuts does suggest something has changed” in Silicon Valley, which used to “inhabit its own reality.” Now the tech industry behaves “more like the rest of the economy.”
The glum mood has chilled Google’s vibe, said Nico Grant in The New York Times. Perhaps no other company embodied the perk-filled tech workplace more than Google, famous for its in-office slides, free massages, and gourmet food offerings. But “rolling job cuts in recent months, after a year of significant layoffs, have employees on edge.” Some of the cuts have impacted the experimental projects that were once a mainstay of Google’s “tinker community.” Employees have grown “reluctant to ask for the so-called 20 percent, or side, projects, which used to be a way” they could explore ideas.
Tech giants are trying to get leaner, said Camilla Hodgson in the Financial Times. After overhiring during the pandemic, companies like Spotify and Twitch have been “evaluating their workforces and concluding that ‘we’ve got a bunch of deadwood,’” according to one analyst. But cuts in 2024 have also “come alongside ‘active hiring’” in areas of new investment, such as generative artificial intelligence. The enterprise software company SAP, for instance, recently axed around 8,000 jobs but said it will add the same number of staffers who will be focused on AI.
Tech layoffs have become another “accepted fact of economic life,” said Timothy Noah in The New Republic. Silicon Valley was “the last holdout” treating its workers as “special.” Layoffs were understandable during the sell-off in tech stocks in 2022, “but that was two years ago.” Tech stocks rebounded in excess of 50 percent “as the market got excited about AI.” But the technology that revived them has also “become the reason to lay workers off.” Automation will replace more and more humans, and the “money previously diverted to salaries will fund ever more stock buybacks and dividends.” Tech workers are now just like everyone else, “biding their time until they’re right-sized into oblivion.”