Tech HR departments are out of their depth. After years of throwing money at anyone with a computer science degree or IT experience, companies are having to get rid of employees instead.Amazon and the Facebook owner Meta lead the pack for scale of job cuts, with more than 10,000 planned apiece, while Twitter is grabbing headlines for brutality and incompetence. New owner Elon Musk axed roughly 3,700 employees via email and immediately tried to rehire some of them, saying they had been let go by mistake.
The firing spree goes beyond the big names: nearly 800 tech companies have announced redundancies since January, wiping out 120,000 jobs, including 25,000 just this month, according to layoffs.fyi, a tracking website.
Barring a few veterans who survived the dotcom crisis, tech workers have never seen anything like this. The way the cuts are handled could shape the sector’s culture for years to come.