Over 250,000: This is the number of jobs that have disappeared globally in the tech sector since the start of the Covid crisis in March 2020, according to layoffs.fyi. The vast majority of these job cuts, about 150,000, occurred in 2022, including at least 50,000 in Silicon Valley alone. And since November 1, more than 30,000 technical workers have been laid off in the region. With anecdotal announcements – such as these 200 job cuts at Oracle – to the most media-savvy, Twitter of course (5,200 or more, depending on Elon Musk’s mood) or Meta (11,000), and other Valley darlings, such as Hewlett-Packard (4000 to 6000), Cisco (4165), Stripe (1000), Salesforce (999), Lyft (743) and even Intel (200).
What is striking about this list is that all technology sectors are affected. Cryptocurrencies, of course, but also health, entertainment, real estate, infrastructure, artificial intelligence, transportation, self-driving cars…
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These numbers are certainly far below reality because they don’t take into account announcements made by Amazon (10,000) or Microsoft (1,000), which, although based in Seattle, have many employees in San Francisco. And many companies have announced layoffs without giving figures. Finally, the other two Gammas, Google and Apple, if they don’t announce anything, are also affected by the layoffs as they haven’t hired dozens of new employees in weeks, a habit of integrating weekly for years.
Talent is finally available to startups
As with previous challenges that rocked the Valley, we know who will stand to benefit from all the talent that these well-established companies have fired: will they join or create startups that will compete with them tomorrow. They usually can’t compete with the compensation and benefits offered by their seniors—the average salary for a Google or Meta engineer is over $300,000 a year. Finally, they will be able to afford the services of experienced workers who are just waiting to share their experience with these young shoots, where their contribution will be even better demonstrated. And even if it will be harder to raise funds from a few scalded investors, these engineers, designers or product managers will finally be able to devote themselves to projects that until then were only dreams for big technology companies that did not dare to get into it.
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The context lends itself all the more to a certain thrift in that we are confronted with such fundamental problems as the energy crisis and the acceleration of global warming. History shows that it is in these difficult times that innovative ideas are born. Some of these startups are the mammoths of tomorrow, which in turn will be forced to cut costs due to the next major crisis.