Geoff Bennett:
The job cuts in big tech are piling up. Microsoft said today it's laying off 10,000 employees. And Amazon today started a fresh round of job cuts in what's expected to become the largest work force reduction in its 28-year history.
It all follows recent work force reductions by Twitter, Meta, Lyft, Salesforce, and other tech companies, more than 120,000 tech sector employees laid off in just the last year coming during a period of slowing growth and fears of a possible recession on the horizon.
Roben Farzad is host of public media's "Full Disclosure" podcast, and he's here to help us sort through this news.
It's great to see you, friend.
So, Roben, Amazon, as you well know, went on a hiring spree during the pandemic. Microsoft appears to be bracing for slower revenue growth. What accounts for these latest job cuts?
Roben Farzad, Host, "Full Disclosure": They all got really ahead of themselves.
Believe it or not, there was euphoric thinking at the end of 2020. Back then, I mean, let me take you back. We were slathering everything in Purell. We were not touching salad bars. Suddenly, filling in that vacuum in this time of panic, all these tech players were saying, there's a whole new normal. We're going to be working from home exclusively. There will be never-ending demand for cloud services and software.
And these companies went on a hiring spree as their stocks surged to record highs. You had a trillion-dollar club and the Nasdaq occupied by five or six players. And I think, as a lot of that thinking has kind of come on done, and you realize that the economy matters and cyclicality matters, they're starting to prune at the margins.
They have massive work forces. Microsoft, I believe, was a quarter-of-a-million people. So, when you see 10,000 or 15,000 workers reduced, that's a big absolute number, but, in the grand scheme of Microsoft, it's kind of — you don't want to sound terrible saying this, but it's kind of pruning for them.
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