Technology companies have announced more than 60,000 job cuts this year. By comparison, about 65,000 tech jobs were lost each year in 2008 and 2009 during the recession.
The number of tech layoffs this year is nearing annual levels seen during the Great Recession, but is far from dot-com-bust territory.
Some longtime Silicon Valley observers and experts say this downturn is not like the dot-com bust of 2001 and 2002, because many of the companies that failed back then weren’t “real” companies. And though their estimates of how long this bust will last vary, they mostly agree that the impact will be significant and affect workers and others who power the industry.
“Silicon Valley has cycles,” said Russell Hancock, CEO of Joint Venture Silicon Valley. “We go up, we go down. It happens with regularity about every 10 years.” Hancock, who said he thought it was too early to say “the sky is falling,” added that he thought the beginning of the pandemic would spark the downturn. Instead, he said, “the pandemic turned out to be bonanza for tech… but it just turned out to be a spike and didn’t lead us to a new plateau. Now, demand is tapering.
Tech employees of all stripes — those with different levels of experience, or those with H-1B visas and needing employer sponsorship to stay in this country — are losing their jobs, according to layoff lists seen by MarketWatch. All of this is going to affect not just highly paid tech employees but also the other workers who are part of tech’s giant ecosystem.
Does he think the downturn will help unions make inroads into tech? “I wish,” he said. “Getting these kinds of workers to organize is even more difficult than in other industries, and it’s not easy anywhere.”
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