SAN FRANCISCO — After a year of major layoffs, job cuts at the tech industry's largest companies have been extended through 2024.
Google began the year with layoffs of several hundred employees and the promise of more cuts to come. Amazon was next, cutting hundreds of positions in its Prime Video department. Meta reduced middle management. Microsoft eliminated 1,900 jobs in its video game division.
Layoffs continued even as sales and profits increased and stock prices soared. That disconnect, tech industry experts and analysts say, stems from the frenetic expansion of the workforce during the pandemic, while now taking an aggressive step toward building artificial intelligence.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, said on a recent call with analysts that his company had to lay off employees and control costs “in order to invest in these ambitious, long-term visions around AI.” He added that he had realized that “we function better as a leaner company.”
From late 2019 through 2023, technology companies scrambled to keep up with an explosion in demand from consumers stuck at home. Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Alphabet, Google's parent company, added a total of more than 900,000 jobs.
When that boom ended, they made adjustments. Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Apple eliminated about 112,000 jobs from their respective peaks in 2021 and 2022. But they were still larger and more profitable than before the pandemic began.
The five companies today employ 2.16 million people, 71 percent more than before the pandemic. They generated $1.63 billion in sales in their most recent fiscal years, about 81 percent more than five years earlier. Wall Street has rewarded them. In the past year, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Apple gained almost $3.5 trillion in market value.
“We go through these cycles where you see an intense focus on innovation, and then the pendulum swings and there's an intense focus on financial results,” said Tim Herbert, director of research at CompTIA, a technology research and education organization. . “But when I read that Amazon is cutting Alexa staff or that Google is cutting staff on its Pixel phone, it tells me there's a focus on margins. “They are cutting where they can and redistributing resources.”
Generative AI has altered everyone's business priorities.
Major technology companies are rushing to hire engineers to build AI systems. Last year, there were 180,000 job openings in the United States related to AI, including positions in software development, semiconductor engineering and cloud computing, CompTIA says. The number of job offers in AI has grown this year.
Those employees are helping Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta improve chatbots and create other AI systems. Apple is hiring AI engineers as the company develops its own AI offering to launch later this year.
Companies are spending billions of dollars on the supercomputers and chips needed to train and build AI systems. By the end of the year, Meta expects to have purchased 350,000 specialized Nvidia chips, which cost approximately $30,000 each.
This has coincided with cuts elsewhere. Google reduced the number of people working on augmented reality technology. Meta, which laid off nearly 20,000 employees last year, has been cutting some of its program managers, who oversee projects and are responsible for keeping teams on schedule.
Since then, Amazon has eliminated about 30,000 corporate positions and about 50,000 other jobs, a person with knowledge of the changes said, and its leadership has made clear those jobs won't be returning anytime soon.
Unlike its peers, Apple showed restraint in hiring during the pandemic. But the company began reducing its workforce last year, when sales of iPhones, iPads and Macs fell. For the first time in at least 15 years, it reported that its total number of employees decreased, even as it avoided major layoffs.
Microsoft did not report a reduction in its total number of employees. The company employed 221,000 people at the end of its 2023 fiscal year, equal to its post-pandemic peak.
Investors have rewarded Microsoft's stability. Last month it dethroned Apple as the most valuable company in the world. Its market value is now more than 3 billion dollars.
By: Tripp Mickle
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/7111548, IMPORTING DATE: 2024-02-12 22:18:03
#technology #giants #continue #cut #jobs #good #results