Redundancies are an inevitable consequence of tough economic times. Some 70 per cent of business costs are typically spent on staff, so it makes sense that people are the first to go when cutbacks are being made. It came as no surprise, then, that as the current economic crisis came starkly into view, news of layoffs began trickling in.
What was surprising, and somewhat unprecedented, was just how far those mass layoffs would spread. And how even the likes of Big Tech would not be immune to this trend.
At the time of writing, the number of tech job cuts worldwide in 2022 has exceeded 142,000, and 85,000 of those have come from the US, according to layoffs.fyi and Crunchbase figures. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google, known under the acronym FAANG, have each responded to the downturn with varying severity, yet the bulk of those 85,000 have come from a small number of big firms such as these.
Yet, analysis from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has found that the number of...