Tech and biotech layoffs wipe out more than 19,000 Bay Area jobs – Marine Independent Journal

People take a photo in front of the Meta sign as an employee-transportation bus pulls into the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on Oct. 20, 2022. (Douglas Zimmerman/Special to Bay Area News Group)

Strikes in the tech and biotech sectors have been on the rise since the pandemic, and devastating job losses have loomed over the region’s economy for months.

Starting in mid-2022, tech and biotech companies — including giants like Google and MetaPlatforms — plan to cut more than 19,000 jobs in the nine-county Bay Area, according to official government reports. That figure includes reductions that have been completed or are scheduled to occur, in some cases through the end of 2024.

To make matters worse, several tech companies, including Intel, have notified the state Department of Employment Development in recent days that they plan to coordinate a second round of layoffs on top of previously announced layoffs.

“We’re at a point where layoffs are becoming more widespread in tech and biotech,” said Russell Hancock, president of San Jose-based research firm Joint Venture. “But it’s important to put these numbers in perspective.”

Hancock and other experts He says the layoffs won’t turn into an extinction event similar to the dot-com meltdown of the 2000s, when hundreds of thousands of people around the Bay Area, many in tech, lost their jobs.

“It’s not even close to the dot-com situation,” said Tim Bajarin, CEO of Campbell-based Innovation Strategies, which tracks the technology sector. “The dot-com bust happened because a lot of people believed they could produce apps that had no business model and couldn’t make a profit.”

Analysts say the dynamics this time around are very different from the dot-com bust.

“These are companies that are making adjustments,” said Patrick Kalerman, vice president of research at the Bay Area Council’s Economic Institute. “This is calculated belt tightening. Even this level of recession is not job cuts.

In the current wave of layoffs, big tech is scrambling to adjust the size of its employee base in the wake of the deadly coronavirus pandemic, which has forced people to work, connect and study remotely due to government-mandated business lockdowns. Virus. Many tech companies whose products help enable remote work responded by ramping up workforces, but later learned that not all of the changes brought about by the pandemic were sustainable.

“The layoffs are a rebalancing after a period of record job growth and don’t suggest we’re in danger of the same kind of pain after the dot-com bust, when the region lost nearly 300,000 jobs,” said Stephen Levy. Director of the Palo Alto Center for Continuing Studies of the California Economy.

The final toll on the current flood of workers is unclear. What’s certain is that tech and biotech companies have jettisoned their businesses faster than ever in recent months, according to an analysis of WARN ads sent to EDD by the news organization.

“There’s been overexcitement in the tech industry because of the coronavirus,” said Rob Enderl, an Oregon-based technology analyst. “Technology companies were motivated to satisfy demand for their services and products, and they thought that demand would be permanent. But the demand turned out to be temporary.”

In the year In the last six months of 2022, from July 1 to December 31, technology and biotech companies will lose just under 7,100 jobs, based on the projected effective date of the job cuts in the WARN notice.

Just from Jan. 1 to Feb. 8 — about five weeks — tech and biotech companies completed or reported plans to eliminate another 12,400 positions, including layoffs this month, in March, April, May and beyond, the WARN letters show.

According to WARN notices, 2023 brought the two worst months for completed or planned layoffs in the current layoff cycle. In January, tech and biotech companies laid off 5,384 jobs in Bay Area cities. In March, the planned strikes currently total about 5,248.

Meta, Google and Salesforce each said they plan to eliminate at least 1,000 jobs in the Bay Area, based on EDD filings dated July 1, 2022. Twitter, Cisco Systems, Amazon and others by at least 500. Intel, PayPal, Tesla and other high-profile companies have reduced the total number of employees.