The Tech Bloodbath Is Far From Over: Industry Limps To Midpoint Of 2024

2023 was a historically terrible year for the tech industry. Halfway through, 2024 has not been as bad.

But it’s still a bloodbath out there, according to two websites that track industry layoffs.

TrueUp, a career advisory platform that has been tracking layoffs of engineers, designers, product managers, marketers, account managers, and others at companies big and small since mass layoffs began in 2022, says that so far in 2024 (through June 25), there have been 648 layoffs at tech companies, with 151,165 people impacted — for an average of 854 people per day. That’s pretty awful, but it’s not as bad as the 2,011 layoffs with nearly 430,000 people impacted per day in 2023.

Last year, TrueUp says, 1,177 people in the tech industry lost their jobs every day.

LAYOFFS.FYI: 2024 HAS SEEN 344 LAYOFFS IMPACTING NEARLY 100K EMPLOYEES

TrueUp finds that the worst month for tech layoffs so far this year was January, when more than 45,000 employees globally lost their jobs; among them were 8,000 at SAP and more than 3,000 at Xerox. This month, Microsoft laid of 1,500, including hundreds in its Azure cloud business.

Another layoff tracker, Layoffs.fyi, run by Roger Lee, an Internet entrepreneur based in San Francisco, finds that so far in 2024, 344 companies have had layoffs impacting 99,672 employees. That’s terrible news for tens of thousands of workers and their families — but still on pace to be the lowest amount of layoffs in three years: a walk in the park compared to the 1,191 tech companies with 263,180 employees laid off in the 12 months of 2023, or the 1,064 tech companies that laid off 165,269 employees in 2022.

Layoffs.fyi concurs with TrueUp that the first quarter of 2024 has so far been the worst, with especially big layoffs occurring in January and February at Google, Citrix, Wayfair, eBay, Microsoft, SAP, and PayPal. This month, mass layoffs have occurred at Paytm, a finance company (3,500 workers); Chegg, an education company (441 workers or 23% of its workforce); and Wex, a Portland-based finance company (375 workers, or 5% of its workforce); among many others.

Source: Layoffs.fyi

WILL B-SCHOOLS SWOOP IN AGAIN?

Business schools are something of a canary in a coal mine for tech layoffs. At most of the elite M7 schools, tech job placement has been declining for years; at all seven, it stands worse than it was in 2019, the last MBA class to graduate before the coronavirus pandemic. MIT Sloan School of Management, which had historically led all M7 schools in tech placement, saw its numbers decline from over 30% to just over 24% in the MBA Class of 2023; even Stanford Graduate School of Business, which had actually seen tech gains each year from 2019 to 2022, saw declines in 2023. (See table below.)

It remains to be seen if top U.S. B-schools will repeat their initiatives of past years, when they stepped in to offer recently laid-off tech workers the lifeline of returning to school. Led by Northwestern Kellogg School of Management, which made highly publicized overtures to laid-off techies in November 2022 (and extended its test waiver for MBA applicants in January 2023), one by one the leading U.S. B-schools reached out to the masses of newly unemployed product managers, engineers, and other tech staff at companies large and small, boosting their MBA ranks at an uncertain time.

As the uncertainty mounts once again, B-schools may once more be these workers’ salvation.

Source: School employment reports

DON’T MISS TECH LAYOFFS CONTINUE TO MOUNT, AND B-SCHOOLS ARE STANDING BY TO HELP