The widening layoffs in the tech and biotech sectors are poised to hit the Bay Area job market with brutal employment losses that could loom over the region’s economy for months.
Post-pandemic layoffs in the tech and biotech sectors continue to widen, and the brutal job losses are set to loom over the region’s economy for months.
Since mid-2022, tech and biotech companies — including giants like Google and Meta Platforms — have revealed plans to slash more than 19,000 jobs across the nine-county Bay Area, according to official state reports reviewed by this news organization. That figure includes cutbacks that have been completed or are slated to occur, in some cases as late as 2024.
Even worse, multiple tech companies, including Intel, in recent days have notified the state Employment Development Department of plans to orchestrate a second round of layoffs on top of job cuts announced earlier.
“We’ve reached the point where layoffs are becoming widespread in tech and biotech,” said Russell Hancock, president of Joint Venture, a San Jose-based think tank. “But it’s important to keep these numbers in perspective.”
Hancock and other experts insist the layoffs won’t morph into an extinction event akin to the dot-com meltdown of the 2000s, when hundreds of thousands of people across the Bay Area, many of them in tech, lost their jobs.
“It’s not even close to the dot-com situation,” said Tim Bajarin, principal executive with Campbell-based Creative Strategies, which tracks the tech sector. “The dot-com bust occurred because so many people believed they could produce apps that had no business models and couldn’t generate profits.”
The dynamics this time are far different than the dot-com collapse, analysts say.
“These are companies that are making adjustments,” said Patrick Kallerman, vice president of research with the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. “This is a calculated belt-tightening. This is not even recession-level job cutting.”
With the current wave of cutbacks, Big Tech is attempting to right-size its employee base in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, which sparked a crush of people working, meeting and learning remotely due to the government-mandated business lockdowns to combat the deadly virus.
