At least 74 significant tech companies laid off over 15,000 workers in February. Here, we attempt to comprehend the possible cause of the industry-wide job cuts that have been occurring.
Over the past few years, the industry has been disrupted by tech layoffs. However, massive corporate layoffs of thousands of employees occurred in 2023. Google has advised its employees to prepare for additional layoffs in 2024, suggesting that the wave of layoffs is likely to continue. The Alphabet Inc. corporation let go of thousands of employees across several departments in the first few weeks. Up to 49,386 workers have been laid off by 186 tech companies thus far.
Even though there were fewer layoffs in February than in January, given the state of the economy, it appears that workers in the sector may face instability for the remainder of the year.
Numerous variables are responsible for the current wave of layoffs occurring in the United States. However, the primary causes of this are the erratic state of the economy and the quickly shifting corporate interests.
Reorganization and changes in strategy
Many businesses both domestically and abroad are currently going through internal reorganisation. Their corporate priorities have clearly changed. And this is one of the factors that may cause some departments or projects to be abandoned, which can result in a large number of job losses. In January of this year, the German software company SAP unveiled its reorganisation plan, stating that it will impact 1,082,000 employees, or more than 7% of the workforce. The company wants to become cloud-centric, and part of the way it plans to do this is by using AI to drive growth. In a similar vein, Expedia Group declared that it would be letting go of 1500 staff members in an effort to reduce costs.
