Tech's Mass Layoffs Backfire in a Major Way
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
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Last year, there was a seismic shift in the way that tech workers thought about their jobs.
Prompted by the pandemic, workers across the country soon found that they could have more flexibility and agency in their workdays. An ongoing imbalance in the labor market – which still has more jobs than workers – led to people embrace the chance to renegotiate their wages or benefits.
Seemingly everyone was reevaluating their relationship to their work, with a record number of people quitting their jobs in 2021, according to federal labor data. That trend is expected to continue this year.
Certainly, morale was never high at any point during the pandemic, but those lucky enough to avoid being caught in the earliest waves of temporary COVID-19 layoffs quickly began scaling back the energy and time they devoted to their employers. The feeling was, finally, that workers clawed back a little of their agency over their time during the work week.
But these last few months have been a stark reminder that that feeling of greater agency was more mirage than anything else.
Tech job cuts are hitting the bulk of the FAANG companies and trickling down: Amazon will cut 18,000 jobs, Microsoft axed 10,000 positions. Alphabet let go 12,000 people, while Meta cut 11,000 and IBM recently laid off nearly 4,000. So far, Apple’s refrained from cutting workers, but we’ll see if that continues.
Some have speculated that the layoffs are a way to reign in workers. These firms are using layoffs as a way to cut costs of inflated wages and show investors that they can keep up with the record profits they posted in the last two years. Even when the cash flow is high, there’s always a bigwig in the C-suite ready to trim whatever they think resembles fat.
Los Angeles had 85 layoffs across 70 tech companies since 2020, according to tracker Layoffs.Fyi. That’s second to San Francisco, which had over 540 different layoffs in that same timespan, and New York, which counted 227. Globally, the tech industry has laid off over 68,000 people so far this year… and it’s barely even February.
What all this is contributing to is a pervasive feeling of insecurity among tech toilers who don’t feel motivated to invest their maximum effort into a job if they’re just going to be cut a week later. In short, uncertainty is killing both productivity and loyalty.
Promotions aren’t as available, especially for remote workers. There’s even a new buzzword for this: “quiet promotions,” a phenomenon where companies give workers more responsibility, but not the pay bump that usually comes with a promotion.
With upward mobility stalled, however, employees aren’t so incentivized to do their best work. We at dot.LA have even heard stories about managers telling their employees not to work their hardest, or start looking for other jobs in case they’re cut. There’s also evidence that suggests folks in the tech industry who’ve been laid off aren’t as keen to keep working in it, which could further a job shortage.
In the r/antiwork subreddit, a place disgruntled workers can go to air their frustrations, people have recently begun to point out that productivity no longer even matters since everyone is on the chopping block: “they will still lay you off no matter how productive you are,” one person noted.
This is all to say that in its quest to cut costs in the short term, the tech industry could be digging a deeper hole for itself when it comes to future hiring. If you thought “quiet quitting” was invading the tech industry last year, “loud layoffs” are sure to encourage gainfully employed tech workers to continue to do the bare minimum. – Samson Amore
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Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
