The layoff announcements coming lately from the chief executive officers of big technology companies all contain variations on the theme of ¡°we hired too many people during the pandemic,¡± expressed with varying degrees of contrition.
At one end of the spectrum are Seattleites Andy Jassy of Amazon.com Inc. and Satya Nadella of Microsoft Corp. Amazon¡¯s layoffs were simply an outgrowth of its annual review, Jassy wrote, although he did allow that ¡°this year¡¯s review has been more difficult given the uncertain economy and that we¡¯ve hired rapidly over the last several years.¡± Microsoft¡¯s Nadella opted for bland corporatespeak: ¡°As we saw customers accelerate their digital spend during the pandemic, we¡¯re now seeing them optimize their digital spend to do more with less.¡±
Down in the San Francisco Bay Area, there was more of a willingness to hint that errors had been made. ¡°Over the past two years we¡¯ve seen periods of dramatic growth,¡± wrote Sundar Pichai of Google parent Alphabet Inc. ¡°To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.¡± Mark Benioff of Salesforce Inc. was even clearer: ¡°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.¡± Then there was Mark Zuckerberg of Meta Platforms Inc., who opted to treat his November layoff message to employees as something of a confessional:
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