The tech industry’s moment of reckoning: layoffs and hiring freezes

Following a report from The Wall Street Journal, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is notifying employees that the company’s ongoing layoffs will affect 18,000 workers.

It’s the first time we’ve gotten a concrete number from Amazon since The New York Times reported in November that the company planned on cutting 10,000 jobs.

On January 3rd, 2022, the value of Apple’s shares briefly crossed $3 trillion.

Today, on January 3rd, 2023, the value of $AAPL shares fell to 125.07 at the market’s close, a 52-week low that sets its market cap at a frankly piddling $1.99 trillion. It was the last holdout in the club, following Microsoft and Saudi Aramco’s exits last year, but now analysts are predicting a slight decline in revenue when Apple releases its latest quarterly earnings report in a few weeks.

The share price is down amid greater economic and interest rate concerns (see, it’s not just Tesla and crypto taking a beating), as well as gloomy news about both iPhone production and demand.

A group of former Meta employees say they’re only receiving eight weeks of base pay and three months of COBRA as severance — half of what CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised when the mass-layoffs were announced, according to CNBC.

The full-time, non-contract workers, who were in a Meta apprenticeship program, say the company hasn’t responded to their questions with an answer on whether the discrepancy is intentional.

Axios reports GameStop has begun another round of layoffs. The scale of the layoff is unclear, but Axios says the blockchain team was “heavily impacted.” In an email to employees obtained by Kotaku, CEO Matt Furlong said the decision to lay off staff was due in part to high inflation and “weakened consumer confidence.”

The company, which gained a lot of notoriety as a meme stock, laid off staff and fired its CFO in July.

Internal documents obtained by Insider indicate that Amazon’s Alexa division made up the “vast majority” of the over $3 billion that the company lost across its “Worldwide Digital” department, which includes Alexa, Echo devices, Prime Video, and other products.

Amazon confirmed layoffs affecting thousands of employees on its hardware and services teams last week, and the company’s CEO says to expect even more job cuts next year.

After reports that Amazon plans to lay off 10,000 workers this week, CNBC and The Washington Post are reporting that some workers there are being informed they will need to find another job with the company soon or accept a severance payment. Neither outlet mentioned how many people were affected today, and so far there haven’t been any companywide notifications.

From the Post:

Amazon employees were called into meetings with their managers across the country Tuesday, and many were told they had two months to find another job internally or accept severance payment.

A nervous Twitter employee, whose boss and coworkers are now gone, has written to the popular work advice column Ask A Manager, asking how the heck they should handle their company’s whole…situation.

Columnist Alison Green’s advice: Stick it out, if you can. “Staying at least gives you the option of severance down the road…and gives you an ongoing income and health insurance,” Green wrote. She added, “I’m sorry something you helped build is being needlessly destroyed.”

In an interview with CBS Mornings, Apple CEO Tim Cook confirms the company is now being very “deliberate” in its hiring and that it’s only bringing new staff members on board in certain departments.

We believe strongly in investing for the long term and we don’t believe you can save your way to prosperity. We think you invest your way to it.

In July, Bloomberg reported Apple planned to slow hiring in 2023 and that not-quite-a-freeze may be setting in early, while other Big Tech companies like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft undergo their own hiring freezes and layoffs.