After the world’s richest person Elon Musk acquired the micro-blogging platform Twitter for 44 billion dollars, he started his first day in the office by firing Twitter’s top executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Ned Segal, and legal affairs and policy chief Vijaya Gadde.
Just a few days after that, he reportedly fired a whole team of Data Engineers. Within a week after, Chief Twit announced layoffs for half of all Twitter employees, which are about 3,700 employees out of 7,500.
Unfortunately, Twitter is not the only giant to lay off its employees.
The long list of companies sacking their employees includes Facebook’s parent company Meta, Google’s parent company Alphabet, Netflix, Byju’s, Microsoft, and many more.
Meta has announced layoffs of more than 11,000 employees, which is 13 percent of the company’s workforce.
“Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history. I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13 percent and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go”, Meta co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, said in a message to the staff.
Situations are similar in India. Around 15,708 people have lost their jobs. The Indian companies included unicorns like BYJU’S, Ola, Meesho, and MPL.
The previous year, the Indian education platform Unacademy is reported to have laid off more than 1,000 employees.
This year, US companies had around 45,000 employees laid off as of October 2022.
Tencent also froze hiring as a measure of cost-cutting.
The unicorn startup Byjus announced it will lay off 2,500 employees, that is 5 percent of its workforce, over the next six months. The company is sacking around 2,500 of its 50,000 employees.
What Is the Reason for Sacking Employees?
Tech firms around the globe are fighting economic slowdowns. The slow consumer spending, higher interest rates by central banks, and strong dollars overseas are hinting toward a possible recession.
As a result, tech firms including Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft are laying off employees or freezing hiring.
Recently, Indian IT companies including Wipro, Infosys, and TCS have fired hundreds of employees for moonlighting (simultaneously working for two or more companies).
IT firms are worried that employees taking up secondary jobs after regular work hours will affect productivity, lead to conflicts of interest, and possibly data breaches.
The most common reason for laying off employees is the pressure from investors and cost-reducing measures. Investors invest in companies in which they see growth potential.
So, these companies are removing their excess employees to cut off their excess expenses, as these startups hired workers even when there was no immediate need for them.
What’s Next for Those Who Have Lost Their Jobs?
There is good news too, Twitter has reached out to its employees who were fired before to return to their positions.
Some of those who are being asked to return were laid off by mistake, according to two people familiar with the moves. Others were let go before management realized that their work and experience may be required.
It is not easy to get a new job during this time of economic crisis. Those who have lost jobs should invest their time in personal development and skills improvement and should regularly practice.
For example, if you design UI, you must keep practicing your skills so that when you get time to apply for a new job, you perform better than others.
You can also learn something new, if you are good at frontend development, try learning backend development. Remember to keep looking for new job offers on LinkedIn. Tech giants’ employees are likely to be hired by small startups as they have lots of experience.
Also published here.