There’s been a lot of news about tech layoffs in recent weeks, just thought I’d collate some of the big ones and put some context in as well:
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Google / Alphabet. Ended last year with about 188,000 employees. Announced cuts of 12,000 recently. Leaves them at 175,000. Still more headcount than they had in 2021.
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Microsoft. Ended last year with about 221,000 employees. Announced cuts of 10,000 recently. Leaves them at roughly 211,000. Comfortably more headcount than they had in 2021.
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Facebook / Meta. Ended last year with about 87,000 employees. Announced cuts of 11,000 recently. Leaves them at 76,000. Still more headcount than they had in 2021.
So my takeaways are:
– The headlines of ‘woah 10,000 jobs cut’ sound like a lot. And they obviously are and each of those jobs is a person who now is out of work, not minimising that. But in % terms they’re not that big a reduction when you see the context of how big these workforces are.
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All these companies are still comfortably larger in terms of headcount than they were just 2 years ago. Facebook is double the headcount it was in 2018. Google and Microsoft aren’t quite 2x as big but aren’t far off.
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Revenue and profit haven’t fallen at these giant co’s yet but they seem to be cutting in advance of that happening based on their own forecasts or expectations.
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Obviously there’s plenty more tech companies out there that have announced cuts but these are a decent proxy for the sector cause of their size and cause we can compare where they were 5 years ago to now (cause they’ve been around for a while).
Do you think there’s more layoffs to come? Or is this the end of this little shrinkage / reset of workforce size?
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