Bay Area tech job cuts revealed so far in 2023 have already topped the total for all of 2022, an ominous reminder of the widening waves of layoffs that the technology industry has orchestrated.
Over the first one-third of 2023, a period of four months, tech companies have revealed plans to chop well over 12,000 Bay Area jobs, this new organization’s review of official state labor filings shows.
The 12,318 job cuts affecting tech workers in the Bay Area that have been revealed so far in 2023 now exceed — by a wide margin — the 10,457 tech sector layoffs disclosed in the nine-county region during all 12 months of 2022, WARN notices on file with the state Employment Development Department show.
The latest tech layoffs in the Bay Area include a disclosure by Facebook app owner Meta Platforms that the company is planning more than 1,500 layoffs in June and July, according to the EDD filings.
Bottom line: Tech industry layoffs during 2023 are galloping ahead at a far more brutal pace than in 2022.
In 2022, tech companies chopped jobs at a rate of roughly 871 a month in the Bay Area.
So far in 2023, tech layoffs in the Bay Area are running at about 3,000 a month. Some of the tech job cuts have already been completed, while others have yet to occur, the EDD WARN notices show.
Ominously, a growing number of tech companies have notified state labor officials of multiple rounds of layoffs.
Meta Platforms, the Facebook owner, has filed disclosures for two waves of layoffs that together would produce a loss of more than 4,000 Bay Area jobs, once the latest cutbacks take place in June and July.
Twitter, Microsoft, Rivian Automotive, Amazon, Roku and Intel have also filed multiple waves of WARN notices during 2022 or 2023. Microsoft’s layoff plans have been filed in three distinct clusters, in February, March and April, a review of the WARN notices on file with the EDD shows.
These layoffs are in numerous instances painful and even devastating for the workers engulfed by the cutbacks.
Yet some experts and the companies themselves often say the job cuts represent a “recalibration” by the tech industry after years of over-hiring to meet the demand for tech gear and services in a time of more remote work, shopping and learning.
Even if the current tech retrenchment is a recalibration, the staffing reductions in the sector are starting to show up in the official employment reports for California and its metro regions that the EDD releases each month.
During the first three months of 2023, tech companies chopped a net total of 16,300 jobs, according to seasonally adjusted estimates that Beacon Economics derived from the official EDD releases for January, February and March of this year.
This represents the worst stretch of job losses for the Bay Area tech industry since the initial stages of the coronavirus pandemic.
From April 2020 through June 2020, which marked the early months of coronavirus-linked business shutdowns, tech companies chopped 58,000 jobs in the Bay Area, Beacon’s seasonally adjusted estimates showed.
Source: www.mercurynews.com