Layoffs are still hammering the tech industry hard, especially in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
With Google and Salesforce, two of the San Francisco Bay Area’s largest, most influential companies, posting severe layoffs in the past two weeks, 2023 so far appears to be a continuation of the rough year tech workers had in 2022.
Since Jan, 3, the first business day of 2023, San Francisco Bay Area-headquartered companies have laid off 24,542 employees, according to data from layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi; in the entirety of 2022, more than 47,000 workers were affected. And in November — the worst month for Bay Area tech layoffs in 2022, during which Twitter, Meta, Lyft and DoorDash laid off workers — 27,932 employees were given the pink slip.
Google and Salesforce alone comprise a staggering number of 2023’s layoffs so far; between them, 20,000 workers were affected. But Friday’s layoffs at Google, based in Mountain View, appeared to be a particularly ominous portent for what’s to come this year in the industry. On Blind, the anonymous job forum, multiple users lamented the Google layoffs, in part because of how resistant the company has been to layoffs up to this point. One worker said Google was “the last company” they expected to conduct layoffs, while another wrote a curt message: “No one is safe.”
For as alarming as these layoffs are, they come after what Layoffs.fyi founder Roger Lee described as an “unprecedented hiring spree” in tech during a pandemic-era period of favorable industry conditions.
But the message does ring a bit hollow for workers — and it seems likely that layoffs will continue for a little while longer.
Hear of anything going on at a Bay Area tech company? Contact SFGATE tech editor Joshua Bote securely on Signal at 707-742-3756.