Fourteen days into the New Year, 46 tech companies have laid off ~7,500 employees, per layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi.
Notable announcements:
• Google confirmed it was axing about 1,000 employees last Wednesday across its Google Assistant, core engineering, and hardware teams that work on Pixel, Nest, and Fitbit
• Amazon cut hundreds of people working in its Audible, Twitch, MGM Studios, and Prime Video units.
• Discord, the messaging app with IPO ambitions, slashed 17% of its staff
• Apple, which avoided the mass-scale layoffs of its rivals in 2023, is shutting down a 121-person team working on Al in San Diego, Bloomberg reported
Despite this wave of layoffs, experts told Wired these job cuts are materially different-and less ominous-than thos in previous years, specifically 2023 which saw tech companies cut nearly 263,000 jobs.
Rather than sweeping cost-cutting efforts, many of the early 2024 layoffs reflect relatively healthy tech companies shuffling their priorities. That may not be reassuring to anxious employees, but it's something we've seen before:
Layoffs have historically jumped around the fiscal year-end in December and January, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.