Tech Layoffs Keep Coming. Why Is Head Count Barely Budging?
Never mind the layoffs: Some of the biggest U.S. tech companies have swelled their ranks much more than they have trimmed them. Microsoft, Alphabet and Netflix each employed 50% more people than before the pandemic, year-end disclosures show.
Not far behind is Meta Platforms, and Amazon.com has nearly doubled its workforce since 2019, a Wall Street Journal analysis shows. Since late 2022, these companies have said they would cut more than 70,000 jobs combined. Continued hiring, acquisitions and past recruiting binges have more than offset the recent wave of reductions.
Consider Microsoft. In January, the software giant said it would cut 1,900 jobs in its videogame unit, after promising to shed some 11,370 in three layoff announcements last year. Job cuts announced in January targeted employees of Activision Blizzard, which employed about 13,000 people before it was acquired by Microsoft in October.
Activision employees weren’t reflected in Microsoft’s most recently disclosed employment figures. Most of Microsoft’s head-count growth appears to have come outside the U.S., where 101,000 people worked for the company at its fiscal year-end, up more than 70% from 2019. A Microsoft spokeswoman declined to comment beyond the company’s securities filings.
A similar hiring boom occurred at Alphabet. Google’s parent company employed 182,502 people at the end of last year, up more than 63,000 from 2019. That increase includes Alphabet’s employment levels falling about 8,000 last year.
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