US tech giants continue with layoffs despite improving economy

Google CEO Sundar Pichai apologised for the layoffs the company announced last week and said he “takes full responsibility” for the decisions that led to them. The tech giant cut 12,000 employees from its global workforce last week, joining the continuing spate of layoffs by tech firms. Mark Zuckerberg sounded equally contrite last November when Meta fired more than 11,000 employees. Tech giants IBM and Spotify joined the line this week, taking up the total of tech employees cut this year to 53,000, according to the tally by Crunchbase News; and it’s only January. More than 140,000 were let go in 2022, when the tsunami of firings started sending shockwaves around the world. Buoyed by the massive spike in online usage during lockdowns around the world by governments as the first line of defence against Covid-19, these companies had hired at express speed in massive numbers with the expectation of business remaining unchanged for years. But as vaccines brought life back to normal, online usage began to shrink and the additional staff hired in expectation of booming business suddenly began to look redundant. Worse, the US Federal Reserve’s aggressive interest rate hikes starting June last year raised fears of a recession that looms over the economy. “I’m deeply sorry for that,” Pichai said in a note announcing the layoffs. “The fact that these changes will impact the lives of Googlers weighs heavily on me, and I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here,” he said. He added: “Over the past two years, we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.” Zuckerberg was more specific about the changed reality. “At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended,” he wrote