News of
executive firings
and emerging reports of plans for
rank-and-file layoffs at Twitter
in the wake of billionaire Elon Musk’s takeover have splashed across headlines this past week on the heels of other job cuts at high-profile tech companies, including Microsoft and DocuSign.
But recruiters and industry experts say the market for U.S. tech workers is still relatively strong, despite gloomy economic indicators and talk of a recession amid stubbornly high inflation.
Twitter did not respond to an emailed request for comment, and the company has not filed any layoff notices with the state as of Friday.
Tech placement firms like Menlo Park’s Robert Half are not seeing a slowdown in demand from tech companies for a variety of talent.
“There is so much pent-up demand from the pandemic years of companies holding on head count” that many companies are still desperate for workers, said Megan Slabinski, district president for Robert Half, who oversees technology and marketing and creative practices for a broad swath of the West Coast including Northern California.
“You can’t deny the fact that there is a perception that the job market and economy is changing,” Slabinksi said. “But that’s not the reality based on the numbers.”
So what do those numbers say?
Mainly that tech hiring is still strong despite job postings trending down, according to the Computing Technology Industry Association, or CompTIA, a nonprofit trade association.
The group’s
latest report
showed the number of U.S. tech industry jobs breaking the 5 million mark in June, and continuing to rise through last month. But there are something like 100,000 fewer job postings out there these days, compared with March of this year, the report found. Hiring freezes reported at companies including
Meta
might have something to do with.
State numbers also show
a net loss of about 700 information jobs in August and September, but that’s hardly a huge deceleration of the state’s economic engine.
As for layoffs, former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and others in the tech industry who have recently found themselves out of a job may not have to worry too much.
“We’ve seen five months of decline in job postings,” said Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA. “Over those five months, though, we’ve had tech job growth across the entire economy.”
The tech industry includes giants like Google and Microsoft, but also banks, real estate companies, and others that need IT professionals to run their systems. So one group of workers finding themselves laid off doesn’t necessarily mean a gloomier outlook for the workforce as a whole.
“If you are a company like Redfin and housing is slowing, you’re going to be affected differently than if you’re YouTube or an enterprise software company where most of your business is so critical to your customers that they are not going to stop spending altogether,” Herbert said.
That’s not to say big companies aren’t reevaluating their hiring or whether they need the people they already have.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent company Alphabet, said on an earnings call last week that the company was taking a hard look at projects across the company, and the resources they required, amid reports Alphabet planned to
cut hiring in half
as advertising revenue slows.
Layoffs and lower hiring at tech companies in the Bay Area and around the world aren’t slowing interest in tech careers or job placement for newly minted coders, said Robert Merritt, the chief enterprise officer at General Assembly, a for-profit coding and design school with a branch in San Francisco.
Placing students in new jobs has yet to become an issue due to hiring freezes or layoffs, Merritt said.
That’s despite the school placing many of its graduates into jobs with companies like Meta, Microsoft, Apple and Google, said Natalia Garcia, General Assembly’s senior vice president of corporate and external affairs.
Though
confusion reigned at Twitter headquarters
in downtown San Francisco on Friday about whether massive downsizing had begun, publicly announced layoffs can have something of a rolling effect across the industry.
“I wonder if it’s a market signal that (companies) announce layoffs because they see a lot of their competitors do it,” said Herbert, the research chief at CompTIA. “It’s almost as if they feel they need to send a message” that they are controlling costs, he added.
Chase DiFeliciantonio is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: [email protected]
