Big Tech Lay Offs: After Byju’s, Twitter and Meta, now Amazon is also planning to lay off(Amazon Lay Off) their 10K employees. If the total number of layoffs stays around 10,000, it would be the biggest layoff in the history of Amazon. Tech workers who previously could have counted on dozens of offers for their skills will now have to compete for jobs with thousands of other people. With the companies preparing for a long season of uncertainty about their business, they’re having to make hard choices about investments beyond hiring and marketing.
Big Tech Lay Offs: Scary Volume
Hiring and laying off resources is a part and parcel of every business but the lay off volume is a big concern here. While the volume in percentage will look as small as 1% to 15%, in numbers it is huge. And the worse part is, all of them are laying off at the same time.
Most of these tech giants are blaming Covid-19 and economic resession for these lay offs, nobody is really talking about thier hiring and operations mistakes. During Covid19, when people were forced to operate online, these giants took advantage and expanded like monsters. They kept hiring and hiring people without realising that one day people will go back and adopt their pre pandamic habits.
Big Tech Lay Offs: Failed to learn from the cues
While world was recovering from pandamic and signs were shown that people are returning to their old offline habits. Learning from those cues, hiring should have been stopped and efforts should have been made to ensure that these online habits stay post pandamic as well. They missed the opportunity there. Slowly the world came back to pre pandamic life and now there is no point in crying about that.
Big Tech Lay Offs: Leadership Blunder
Meta is now crying about recent privacy policy change done by Apple and other web browsers. No brainer that one day it was going to happen anyway. Not sure why Meta team did not forseen it and worked on their strategies. Efforts should have been made to build back up or parralel plan and avoid this shock. This is a leadership blunder but Meta employees are paying the price.
Amazon is bearing losses in last few quarters and now forced to release people. According to Wall Street Journal, Amazon is looking to resize their manpower of their loss making departments. People from Operations and HR are expected to loose their jobs. The question is, have they reworked on their advertising budget too?
Big Tech Lay Offs: Reasons
There are many factors that resulted this large scale lay offs. In fact, every tech titan have their own reason for right sizing. While Twitter’s layoffs happened because Elon Musk bought the company and took it private, Meta’s CEO claims its 13 percent reduction in staff is a corrective action after the company went on a hiring on large scale during pandemic. Companies like Meta and Snap, who heavily rely on advertising for earning, have also been hit hard by privacy policy changes from Apple. Meanwhile, the iPhone maker is blaming the economy for its own hiring slowdown. Surprisingly, Apple is among one of those few companies which are still announcing record-breaking earnings and beating estimates.
We’ll probably see even more reasons for layoffs or freezes as other companies announce their own.
Eying next financial year
Most of these companies must be preparing next year’s budget. May be the idea is to lay off now and accomodate their 3 months’ salary cost in Q4 and begin new financial year with low cost. May be that is right strategy but tech giants who burnt so much money for building customer habits, killing competitors and capturing markets, it is weird to see them panicing and shaking at the first glimpse of slowdown.
These lay offs are going to hit the moral of those who are still with the company. With insecurity in their minds, it would be double challenge for these tech giants as they will be fighting internal and external battles together.
