Tech layoffs ticked upward slightly in October, according to the latest crowdsourced data from layoffs.fyi. If you’re hunting for a job (or currently employed, but worried about layoffs), are the new numbers cause for concern?
Among the tech companies that unleashed layoffs last month, some of the most prominent included Bandcamp, Stack Overflow, Blue Origin, LinkedIn, Waymo, Google, and Expedia. In many cases, the cuts totaled a few dozen employees. A few companies also collapsed, including logistics startup Convoy and consumer payments startup Braid, and the video-game industry is experiencing widespread cutbacks.
Layoffs are scary, of course. But as you can see from the following chart, last month’s layoffs don’t even begin to approach the massive cutbacks that marked the beginning of 2023:
It’s also important to note that many companies—particularly the tech giants—plan to resume hiring over the next year. For instance, Meta (formerly Facebook) recently announced plans to hire strongly in 2024. “We anticipate growth in payroll expenses as we work down our current hiring underrun and add incremental talent to support priority areas in 2024, which we expect will continue to shift our workforce composition toward higher-cost technical roles,” the company wrote in a statement accompanying its latest earnings.
Salesforce, Microsoft, Google, and other tech giants are also hiring, particularly in critical arenas such as artificial intelligence (A.I.). No matter what the market, those tech professionals with cutting-edge skills have an advantage when it comes to hiring for full-time positions, as well as contracting. (According to a recent Dice.com analysis, all industries are hiring A.I. talent, with education and real estate taking some of the biggest leaps in job postings over the past few years.)
Despite lingering economic fears, the tech unemployment rate hit 2.1 percent in October, according to new U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data analyzed by CompTIA. That’s a slight dip from September, and yet another indication that employers remain hungry for tech talent, particularly for popular roles such as software developers, IT support specialists, systems analysts and data scientists.
