Twitter. Meta. Lyft. Microsoft.
These are all companies who have had to fire a significant portion of their workforce in the past year.
Meta has been affected the most, having to fire 11,000 employees because of a disappointing 4th quarter. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO, says Meta’s move was entirely his decision.
Mark Zuckerberg: “I want to say upfront that I take full responsibility for this decision. You know, I’m the founder and CEO. I’m responsible for the health of our company and for our direction and for deciding how we execute that, including things like this.”
Marco Papa, a senior lecturer of Computer Science at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, is not surprised by the recent economic downturn for Meta.
Marco Papa: “Meta is not in a good shape. Meta is effectively now for old people like me. Young people go on Tik-Tok and that trend is probably going to continue. Zuckerberg is betting on the metaverse. I think in my opinion, it’s still too much of an early adopter market, so I think Meta is going to have a hard time.”
Twitter also just laid off 3,700 employees, shortly after Elon Musk finalized his purchase of the social media platform. Musk said in a Tweet on November 4th these layoffs were necessary because Twitter has been losing over $4 million a day. Papa attributes this to a lack of innovation in their product.
Marco Papa: “If you take a look at what Twitter development has happened in the last three years, it’s hardly anything. So those that were let go were really just getting a paycheck and not really developing anything.”
USC students are worried this recent downturn in tech jobs and hiring freezes will hurt them when they’re entering the job market.
Ben Wang: “A lot of people I know before this talked about how the tech market is kind of oversaturated. I just think freezes across tech in general is definitely very indicative of it being a lot harder to break in I suppose.”
That was Ben Wang, an economics and data science double major who is worried about job placement after graduation.
However, Papa says USC students should not be worried about these layoffs he sees these layoffs as a temporary setback in the tech industry, not a trend.
Marco Papa: “CS is probably the best place now and for at least another five years. There’s a reason why I don’t see anybody that would be or should be deterred to come to USC all because now we are having high tech layoffs and major companies. That doesn’t change the job situation for graduates.”
Meta’s stock is up 10% today and Elon Musk claims Twitter usage is at an all time high. We’ll see if these trends continue and how they will affect the tech job market in the near future.