Gregory Michael Steinberg of Austin, Texas, is a consultant who often gets asked by business associates as well as family and friends about the biggest ongoings in the business world. Few topics have garnered as much attention as the recent mass layoffs in the technology industry. Gregory Michael Steinberg of Austin, Texas, notes that those who work in Silicon Valley have experienced massive layoffs in their industry. Nearly half a million people lost their jobs in the last year alone. With 2022 being an all-time year for layoffs in Silicon Valley, many hoped for brighter news in 2023. However, Gregory Michael Steinberg of Austin, Texas, says things look bleak.
While difficult to predict when things will turn around, Gregory Michael Steinberg of Austin, Texas, believes now is the perfect time for tech organizations to swoop in and secure major talent. Mass layoffs come when a company decides to shut down a portion of their workforce. Typically, anything over 50 people laid off within a month in the tech industry is considered a “mass” layoff. What we have seen within Silicon Valley has far surpassed those numbers.
When it comes to the type of tech companies that experienced mass layoffs, some of the biggest names in the industry got things started, with Peloton, Lyft, and Robinhood all announcing major layoffs to start the year of 2022. Gregory Michael Steinberg of Austin, Texas, believes that companies of similar sizes can often show the start of a chain reaction when they make major layoffs. This was certainly the case with the Twitter layoffs in November. Twitter started, and then Meta, Cisco, and Amazon followed suit. What’s staggering is that the layoffs in 2023 have shown no signs of slowing down, with more than 700 tech companies resorting to major layoffs so far this year. Every day a new headline appears citing more layoffs.
Regarding reasoning, Gregory Michael Steinberg of Austin, Texas, notes that most of these major companies pointed to a need to grow leaner and more efficient while cutting discretionary spending.
Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared as much after the Meta layoffs when he released a statement saying, “Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history. I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go. We are also taking a number of additional steps to become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending and extending our hiring freeze through Q1.”
Google attempted to take a little more ownership of its decision to let go six percent of their human workforce by claiming that it hired for a different economic landscape than the one they are currently operating in. Still, this shows that tech companies are replacing many roles with technology. It also would indicate Google wasn’t aware of the growing role of AI, which is not the case. Not only have advancements in software made it easier for a single employee to complete the job of many, but Google is a company investing in artificial intelligence and even replacing some human jobs with AI.
With so many significant players cutting their staff, it’s a scary time to be in any industry, especially tech. Gregory Michael Steinberg of Austin, Texas, understands that many feel that continued layoffs are inevitable as artificial intelligence grows more advanced. However, some tech companies still don’t support layoffs and many job roles will always require human oversight.
Apple is one of the best examples of a major tech company that has navigated the economic landscape without laying off a serious number of employees. Gregory Michael Steinberg of Austin, Texas, believes Apple has one of the strongest internal infrastructures of any tech company. Unlike most of its industry peers, Apple rarely allows the market to dictate its hiring patterns. By carefully approaching staff growth, Apple has avoided mass layoffs and prioritized investing in their current staff’s development.
Gregory Michael Steinberg of Austin, Texas, blames some of the volatility within the tech industry on the fact that Silicon Valley has been so successful that companies were more than willing to add staff at an incredible pace. The money in big tech isn’t drying up, but there hasn’t been a world-changing product or service debut in a few years now. Without that game-changing product, and on the heels of a pandemic, CTOs in the tech industry will always look at numbers and show no hesitation laying people off in mass numbers. Those who work in the tech industry must know that while another hiring boom is just an industry changing innovation away, it’s also just as likely that mass layoffs can occur just a few months down the road.