Are the biggest rounds of tech layoffs finally over? That’s a question at the top of many tech professionals’ minds. Although executives at companies across the economy still fear the prospect of a recession, the biggest tech giants seem to have slowed the mass layoffs that marked the end of 2022 and beginning of 2023.
In the meantime, how deeply did those tech giants cut? Thanks to layoffs.fyi, which crowdsources layoff data, we have a sense of how many tech professionals lost their jobs at mega-companies over the past six months:
Many of these huge companies went on hiring sprees during the pandemic, fueled by higher-than-usual revenue thanks to homebound consumers relying on e-commerce and cloud services. But widespread terror of an economic downturn has restricted business and individual spending over the past few quarters, dinging tech giants’ income and forcing them to retrench.
The big question now is whether layoffs will continue. According to layoffs.fyi, tech layoffs have declined steadily since a high in January 2023, although some prominent companies (most notably Lyft and Dropbox) continued to cut employees into April. The tech unemployment rate climbed slightly last month, hitting 2.3 percent, according to a new analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data by CompTIA; that’s notably lower than the national unemployment rate of 3.4 percent.
In industries beyond tech, tech hiring continues apace. In a recent survey, 71 percent of HR professionals told CompTIA said they were hiring for growth; 52 percent were continuing to backfill hire. No matter what the state of the economy, companies everywhere continue to need tech pros for everything from building websites to maintaining tech stacks.