Reports of an imminent mass lay-off at Meta suggest that for many employees, their worst fears are about to become reality. But Meta’s are not the only technology workers being shown the door
, fired half its staff. According to Crunchbase, a data provider, more than 50,000 American tech personnel have been laid off so far this year, as the industry goes through a harsh downturn. That amounts to less than 1% of the nearly 6m people employed by America’s technology companies. But it is nevertheless a rude shock for firms far more familiar with hiring than firing.is partly to blame. Meta increased its workforce by nearly 60% over the course of 2020 and 2021.
Not all workers are equally at risk. At Snap, another social-media firm that is laying off 20% of staff, heavy cuts are being made to an experimental division making augmented-reality hardware and to its ad-sales team. Most job cuts in May at Netflix, a video-streamer, were in marketing. Recruiting teams, unsurprisingly, are among those being slimmed down at Stripe. Meanwhile, workers with prized skills, such as data whizzes, are likely to remain in high demand.
In their memo, Stripe’s founders rightly observed that “There’s no good way to do a lay-off.” There are, however, better and worse ways. Explaining the business context, providing staff decent severance and offering support to help them find their next job—as Stripe has done on all three counts—lessens the blow. Dismissing staff over email and locking them out of systems without notice, as Twitter has done, makes for bitter exits. Lay-offs in a downturn are often unavoidable and never pleasant.
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