Focusing on the layoffs that happened doesn't tell the real story of the past 12...
Restored from LinkedIn archive
Focusing on the layoffs that happened doesn’t tell the real story of the past 12 months. Here’s what happens when we take into the hiring that happened, together with the job cuts:
Big Tech companies that let people go still hired more, net, than e.g. Apple which hired slower.
While I don’t have hiring data for all companies that announced layoffs, I would expect a lot more companies to fit this trend.
Take SAP, a company that announced layoffs just today: to let go 3,000 people (about 3% of staff). The company hired more than 11,000 employees in 2022 (11%) and even after taking this cut into account, their 2022 growth rate will have been 8%: ahead of e.g. Apple’s 6% headcount growth.
To be clear, the job cuts by Microsoft - which posted it’s best-ever full-year results in 2022, profits of $72.9B - and Google - which is expected to have it’s second-best year in 2022, with profits of around $66B - were not a “must” for these companies, in that they could not afford to have them. They were a “want” in order to serve their shareholders.
One company that did not do any cuts so far is Apple. I did a deep-dive on why this is, and why I think it’s likely to stay like this. My analysis:
I analyzed much more in depth in why, for example, Google did it’s historic job cuts - when it’s profits did not necessary warrant this - and what Google’s cuts mean for the company, and the industry, in this week’s
The Pragmatic Engineer
. Subscribers can read that issue here:
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