USA: The wave of layoffs in the high-tech sector continues

USA: The wave of layoffs in the high-tech sector continues

Meta wants more efficiency – with fewer employees
San Francisco, 3/8/2023

CEO Mark Zuckerberg is making efficiency one of his company’s goals for the current fiscal year. That means even more pressure for the remaining employees. There aren’t many anymore anyway. Nothing will change about that. On the contrary: the reduction of further workers is certain.
It is speculated that it will affect a few thousand. More than 11,000 employees were released in November. The first major job cuts in the history of the social network affected around 13 percent of employees. At the time, company founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced further measures to make Meta a „leaner and more efficient“ company.
Zuckerberg admitted that he misjudged the sustainability of his company’s growth during the corona pandemic. Like others, he assumed that the positive development would continue after the end of the pandemic. „Unfortunately, that didn’t turn out the way I expected.“ Added to this is the “macroeconomic downturn”.
Finally, in February, Zuckerberg announced that in fiscal 2023 his company would focus primarily on increasing efficiency. In addition, investments in the Metaverse and in artificial intelligence are planned. This includes the new Virtual Reality Headset, which was presented in October.
A little later, Meta announced that the layoffs would affect another 1,000 employees in the display technology division.

At Twitter, another 200 employees have to go

Twitter recently laid off another 200 employees. That’s about 10% of Twitter’s remaining workforce of 2,300 employees. Meanwhile, new owner Elon Musk has told the company’s remaining employees that Twitter will be giving them „very significant“ performance-based stock awards in late March.

Among those who have lost their jobs are product managers, engineers and data scientists, including those who specialize in location reliability and machine learning.

Twitter reduced its monetization infrastructure team from 30 to fewer than eight employees. Twitter product manager Esther Crawford, who oversaw the redesign of the company’s Blue subscriptions and forthcoming payments platform, has been fired, as has senior product manager Martijn de Kuijper, founder of the Revue newsletter startup that was acquired by Twitter in 2021.

The job cuts come after Twitter took its internal Slack offline and blocked employees from communicating via the messaging service.

Twitter has reduced its workforce from more than 7,500 to around 2,000 since being acquired by Elon Musk in late October.

According to Twitter CEO Musk, the layoffs and other cost-cutting measures were taken to avert a projected $3 billion budget shortfall.

In November, Twitter fired its entire ML Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability (META) team as part of company-wide layoffs that affected approximately 3,700 employees.

The META team was tasked with analyzing, explaining and publishing Twitter’s algorithms and ensuring they remain balanced and fair.

Yahoo

Yahoo has also announced mass layoffs. According to a statement from the technology group, more than 20 percent of the entire workforce will lose their jobs as part of a major restructuring of the department for advertising technology. This measure should result in the company concentrating on its core business.

„These decisions are never easy,“ a Yahoo spokesman told CNET. „We believe these changes will simplify and strengthen our ads business over the long term, and enable Yahoo to deliver better value to our customers and partners.“
First, Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone announced the layoffs in an interview. He therefore emphasized that Yahoo is not planning to withdraw from the advertising business. Rather, the goal is to strengthen the in-house Demand Side Platform (DSP). Yahoo DSP helps advertisers buy ads across different websites.
Lanzone also said his company generates „several billion dollars“ in revenue. In November, media reported that Yahoo’s annual revenue was around $8 billion.

review :

Google: 12,000 employees have to go

At the end of January it was also time for Google. A circular announced job cuts of around 12,000 employees worldwide. Sundar Pichai, Chief Executive Officer of Google and its parent company Alphabet, took responsibility for the job cuts. He spoke of an unsustainable increase in staff over the past few years.
In the e-mail, the manager justifies the step with the significant growth in the workforce in recent years. „To accommodate and fuel that growth, we have adapted to a different economic reality than the one we face today,“ writes Pichai.
“It means we have to say goodbye to some incredibly talented people who we took a lot of trouble to hire and have enjoyed working with. I am very sorry about that. The fact that these changes will impact the lives of Googlers weighs heavily on me, and I take full responsibility for the decisions that have brought us here.“
According to Pichai, his decision was preceded by a „rigorous“ review of all product areas and departments to ensure adjustments are aligned with priorities. “The jobs we are cutting are the result of that review. All products, departments, levels and regions are affected,” added Pichai.
In the US, employees receive, among other things, a severance payment of 16 weeks‘ salary plus two weeks for each year of service at Google. Outside the US, Google wants to adhere to the usual regional rules.

Salesforce CEO: wrong HR policy
Earlier this year, it was Salesforce’s CEO Mark Benioff who blamed himself for wrong HR policies during the coronavirus pandemic. In an open letter to all employees, CEO Marc Benioff spoke of a „difficult decision to reduce the number of employees by around 10 percent“. This will eliminate more than 10,000 jobs at the CRM provider.
Among other things, Benioff justified the step with a wrong personnel policy during the corona pandemic: the increased demand for Salesforce products was responded to with too many new hires.
Benioff also pointed to weak customer demand given the difficult economic situation. “I’ve been thinking a lot about how we got to this point. As our revenue has increased as a result of the pandemic, we have hired too many people, which has led to the economic downturn we are now experiencing, and I take responsibility for that.“
Salesforce also confirmed that the office space at the company’s San Francisco location will also be reduced as part of a restructuring. The company, which is considered the largest private employer in the city, had already given up office space during the pandemic. Mayor London Breed acknowledged at the time that the city was having to adjust to the fact that many workers were no longer working in on-site offices.
Media reports that Salesforce will incur costs in the range of $1 billion to $1.4 billion from the downsizing. The reduction in office space is expected to result in a one-time charge of up to $650 million.

Even the really big ones don’t hesitate

After both Amazon and Microsoft reported a drop in sales and profits, Amazon fired 18,000 employees. At Microsoft, 10,000 employees have to look for a new job.
After criticism from investors, Walt Disney is going for a complete renovation and cutting 7,000 jobs. The
Division loses subscribers for the first time in competition with Netflix and Co.

But there are enough jobs.
In January, the strongest demand came from the following sectors:
►128,000 jobs were created in the leisure and hospitality sectors
►82,000 new jobs were created in the professional and business services sector
►58,000 new jobs were created in the healthcare sector.
The January report of the U.S. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the total employment for the period at 517,000 new jobs. This result is reinforced by the unemployment figures. At 3.4%, it is a record low.