“These are the kinds of hard choices we have made throughout our 47-year history to remain a consequential company in this industry that is unforgiving to anyone who doesn’t adapt to platform shifts,” wrote Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO in a recent blog explaining why the company was cutting around 10,000 jobs in the coming months.
Microsoft, which claims that 2022 was a record year financially, is one of many tech firms that have committed to redundancies. Some are more eye-catching than others. For example, fast-growing payments firm Stripe announced at the end of last year that it was cutting 14 percent of its workforce, blaming over-hiring. Salesforce, the poster child for the SaaS industry, is cutting around 10 percent of its employees, with CEO Marc Benioff claiming, “as our revenue accelerated through the pandemic, we hired too many people leading into this economic downturn we’re now facing, and I take responsibility for that.”
The numbers are stacking up, but as tech redundancy tracking site Layoffs.fyi shows, this is not just about the Big Tech players. The site claims that already this year, 122 tech businesses have laid off over 37,000 employees. While over-hiring during the pandemic may be one reason for cutting headcount, the breadth of the layoffs suggests something more seismic.
Maybe Nadella is right to say that this is more about a platform shift, perhaps with tech firms predetermining the challenges around AI and automation and using economic uncertainty as an additional reason to shed staff. We’ve seen it before. After the dot-com boom and bust in the early noughties and the banking meltdown in 2008, technology trends, such as cloud computing, business process management and virtualization were shaping the industry and creating new opportunities for growth.
Read what our CTO Jaco Vermuelen had to say in ERP Today.
