“Layoffs” is the new buzz word we are hearing in the technology industry nowadays. We have seen tremendous rise in the IT industry during covid19 pandemic. According to a recent survey of NDTV, the IT sector had registered growth of 15.5% in 2021-2022. Revenues of almost all tech giants shot up by huge extent. In order to grab this opportunity, many angel investors had also invested in various tech startups of different domains like EdTech, food-grocery delivery, e-commerce, etc.
These circumstances created a massive demand for IT professionals all over the world. As India is also known for its outsourcing in the IT industry, our engineers also got benefitted. As companies were receiving handsome funding from investors, they also kept on hiring talent thinking that the company will grow significantly in near future. Later on, after the 3rd wave of covid19 came to an end and everything came to normal, most of the restrictions were removed by government, companies failed to achieve their estimated targets whether it is the userbase, revenue, subscriptions, etc.
The situation got further worse because of Russian invasion of Ukraine which hampered the stock markets all over the globe. The war impacted economies of many countries including United Kingdom, United States, China, Sri Lanka, Pakistan etc. UK is one of the important clients for outsourcing IT companies in India, hence India got affected too. Overall it started a global recession which slowed down the growth of almost all sectors specially IT.
In order to cater with adverse effects of recession, tech giants in US started mass layoffs of employees by giving reasons like “Cost cutting and Automation”, “Financial Constraints”, “Restructuring” etc. It started with Meta (the parent company of Facebook), which layed off its 11,000 employees in US.
Stats of important layoffs in US
| Company | Lay off count |
| Meta | 11,000 |
| Amazon | 10,000 |
| 3700 | |
| Better.com | 3250 |
| Microsoft | 3000 |
| Doordash | 1250 |
| Coinbase | 2110 |
| Redfin | 1332 |
| Stripe | 1050 |
Then the same trend started in India with the EdTech giant Byjus which fired 2500 employees. Then many Indian startups also followed the same path. By far approximately 20,484 employees are laid off by 67 Indian startups. Here is the short list of notable layoffs in the Indian tech industry.
Notable layoffs in India
| Company | Lay off count |
| Byjus | 2500 |
| Blinkit | 1600 |
| Ola | 2300 |
| Unacademy | 1500 |
| WhiteHat Jr | 1300 |
| Vedantu | 1109 |
| OYO | 600 |
| ShareChat | 500 |
| Meesho | 450 |
| Toppr | 350 |
| Swiggy | 250 |
| Zomato | 100 |
Further more layoffs are announced by many companies in India as well as US. Some of them are Google, Spotify, etc. This clearly gives us indication that more job cuts may continue to happen in near future due to possibility of recession. The only way to survive in such adverse situation is to continuously upskill ourselves and not depend completely on single job.
Now I realized why our parents always tell us to get a government job 😆Â
Hope you guyies find this info somewhat meaningful !!