The tech industry’s moment of reckoning: layoffs and hiring freezes

Alex Heath joins the show’s first segment to talk us through the latest update on Elon’s first few months at Twitter, and then we turn to Apple’s eventless hardware announcement, HomePod and all.

We also dove into the revelations about CNET’s AI-written stories and discussed the recent spate of Big Tech layoffs, although we recorded the show (available in audio form here for your podcast apps) prior to Friday morning’s bombshell news from Google.

The company is in the process of laying off 18,000 people, and carried out a round of cuts today. Washington’s publicly-accessible WARN system lets us know how many people in Amazon’s home state were affected: 1,852 in Seattle, and 448 across the lake in Bellevue, for a total of 2,300.

“Most” of the people affected will be managers, according to Deadline, though apparently the company classifies around half of its employees with that title. In a statement to Deadline, DirecTV said it was “adjusting [its] operations costs” because less people are paying for TV and shows are getting more expensive to secure and distribute.

Following a report from The Wall Street Journal, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is notifying employees that the company’s ongoing layoffs will affect 18,000 workers.

It’s the first time we’ve gotten a concrete number from Amazon since The New York Times reported in November that the company planned on cutting 10,000 jobs.

On January 3rd, 2022, the value of Apple’s shares briefly crossed $3 trillion.

Today, on January 3rd, 2023, the value of $AAPL shares fell to 125.07 at the market’s close, a 52-week low that sets its market cap at a frankly piddling $1.99 trillion. Now analysts are predicting a slight decline in revenue when Apple releases its latest quarterly earnings report in a few weeks.

The share price is down amid greater economic and interest rate concerns (see, it’s not just Tesla and crypto taking a beating), as well as gloomy news about both iPhone production and demand.

The chipmaker announced the plan as part of its earnings report on Wednesday, saying the reduction would come from “a combination of voluntary attrition” and layoffs throughout 2023. The company also won’t be doing bonuses next year and says that executive salaries will be cut too.

Micron recently reported it has 48,000 employees, according to CNBC, meaning around 4,800 positions could be affected.

Like Intel, which has planned its own layoffs, Micron is investing billions in building new US fabs.

A group of former Meta employees say they’re only receiving eight weeks of base pay and three months of COBRA as severance — half of what CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised when the mass-layoffs were announced, according to CNBC.

The full-time, non-contract workers, who were in a Meta apprenticeship program, say the company hasn’t responded to their questions with an answer on whether the discrepancy is intentional.

Axios reports GameStop has begun another round of layoffs. The scale of the layoff is unclear, but Axios says the blockchain team was “heavily impacted.” In an email to employees obtained by Kotaku, CEO Matt Furlong said the decision to lay off staff was due in part to high inflation and “weakened consumer confidence.”

The company, which gained a lot of notoriety as a meme stock, laid off staff and fired its CFO in July.

HP, one of the world’s largest PC vendors, according to data from Gartner, announced in an earnings report that it’ll lay off 4,000 to 6,000 employees by the end of 2025. According to numbers cited by CNBC, that’s between seven and 11 percent of its workforce.

This is just the latest in a series of large tech layoffs, not to mention that the PC market has also had an especially rough year following a pandemic boom.

Internal documents obtained by Insider indicate that Amazon’s Alexa division made up the “vast majority” of the over $3 billion that the company lost across its “Worldwide Digital” department, which includes Alexa, Echo devices, Prime Video, and other products.

Amazon confirmed layoffs affecting thousands of employees on its hardware and services teams last week, and the company’s CEO says to expect even more job cuts next year.