Silicon Valley giants have successively issued "breakup packages", and industrial talents are returning to academia

Reporter | Lee Kyung-ah

Since November, reports of layoffs at U.S. star tech companies have made headlines almost daily, with more than 200,000 tech workers worldwide affected by the wave of layoffs so far.

Large-scale layoffs have a psychological impact on both leavers and survivors. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of South Carolina recently found that a company's downsizing of its workforce by just 1 percent led to a 31 percent increase in employee turnover the following year.

Faced with uncertain economic prospects and unclear performance evaluation criteria, more employees of Silicon Valley factories began to shift from passive waiting to active job search. After the initial shock, Silicon Valley giants began to hope that the design of severance plans would alleviate the impact of public opinion, and employees of large factories became more pragmatic and paid more attention to layoff compensation.

We've put together the existing severance plans of several tech giants that have undergone massive layoffs.

Google

Layoffs: Layoffs emails were released in the early morning of January 20 West Coast Time

Worldwide employees: 187,000 employees

Percentage of layoffs: 6%

Google will pay salaries during the 2-month preview period, and the severance pay received by the laid-off employees is calculated according to the basic salary based on 16 weeks + additional two weeks per year of working years; The shares of the laid-off employees are paid in advance, which is in line with the basic salary; Last year's bonuses were paid to the laid-off employees, 80% of which were paid in January and the remaining 20% in March; 6 months of medical insurance is available.

But not every fired Alphabet employee gets the above severance conditions, and these benefits are only available to Google employees.

When Google reorganized under Alphabet in 2015, it separated its core money-making business of internet products (including search, Gmail and YouTube) from experimental businesses such as X Moon Lab, Wing delivery drone services and GV venture capital funds. According to Forbes, severance pay for laid-off employees in experimental business units is lower. At Verily, Alphabet's life sciences arm, employees receive 12 weeks + an additional week of severance each year based on the number of years worked.

The same is true for the layoffs of Waymo, Alphabet's self-driving company, even if they previously moved to an Alphabet subsidiary after several years at Google, but Google years are not counted when calculating the number of years worked.

Google's layoffs are seen as courting investors. One of Google's major shareholders, the London-based TCI fund manager, recently wrote to Alphabet again, asking the CEO to cut thousands more jobs, further reduce the cost base, cut the number of employees to 150,000 by the end of 2021, and reduce the compensation of remaining employees.

In some key departments, Google's employees have been affected by layoffs, including Google Cloud, Chrome and Google's internal incubator Area 120, and some Google employees engaged in artificial intelligence have also been laid off.

According to the New York Times, a large part of Google's employees responsible for Fuchsia OS operating system were included in the layoff list. Of the 400 people involved in the project, at least 16 percent were laid off, one of the most affected sectors known to be at the moment. Some Google employees told Interface News that they don't expect this to be Google's only wave of large-scale layoffs in recent times.

Just recently, many of Google's laid-off employees posted on LinkedIn in preparation for reemployment, including software engineers, user experience (UX) designers, technology managers, and some Google Cloud salespeople.

Amazon

Layoffs: Officially started on January 18, a few weeks after an email was sent

Global employees: 1.5 million, including the company's vast warehouse and transportation staff

Layoff ratio: 1.25%, for a total of 18,000 people

Amazon promised that wages and benefits for U.S. employees would remain unchanged for 60 days after being laid off, and then "several weeks of severance pay" and a severance pay based on how long the employee served the company, as well as transitional health care.

The company officially announced 18,000 layoffs in early January and officially began on January 18, giving batches of notifications to employees in recent weeks, but many of them were fired in the first round of layoffs last November. On January 28, Amazon launched the second wave of 18,000 layoffs, and more than 3,000 employees in the US states of New York, California and Washington were notified.

The HR department is the real hit area for layoffs, mainly in Amazon's stores (which includes the entire retail business as well as e-commerce businesses) and its People Experience and Technology Solutions (PXT Solutions) team, which is Amazon's HR department. The layoffs are mainly in the United States, and several teams in Canada are also affected.

Multiple sources show that Amazon's growth engine AWS is not affected by this round of layoffs, but AWS is currently in a hiring freeze. Of the layoffs last November, the most affected device unit has so far laid off just 5,000 jobs.

Microsoft

Layoffs: Layoffs emails were released in the early morning of January 18 West Coast Time.

Worldwide employees: 221,000

Layoff ratio: 4.5%, 10,000 people

Microsoft expects to pay $1.2 billion in severance payments, eligible employees receive "above market" severance pay, 6 months of health insurance, 6 months of continuous stock distribution, and 60-day notice periods, and benefits for employees outside the U.S. will be consistent with each country's employment laws.

Microsoft began notifying some employees last week that job cancellations would continue until the end of the fiscal third quarter of 2023, which ends on March 31.

The software giant officially released little information about layoffs, saying only that it would eliminate positions in some areas and continue hiring in "key strategic areas," without specifying the areas it plans to hire.

In fact, many Microsoft employees from different areas are currently being laid off, including marketing, advertising and the AR glasses HoloLens business. It is understood that Microsoft's two major teams engaged in mixed reality and virtual reality product development have been cut by the human resources department, and its AR glasses HoloLens business and headset-based projects have entered a period of reduction and rectification.

Meta

Layoff time: November 9 last year released a layoff email

Worldwide employees: approximately 87,000 employees

Percentage of layoffs: 13%, totaling more than 11,000 positions

Meta promised to give the laid-off employees 16 weeks + an additional two weeks of severance per year according to the number of years of service, but did not mention 2 months of advance period pay. In addition, Meta will provide 6 months of medical insurance and each employee will receive restricted stock units (RSUs).

Meta opted for a one-off layoff and extended the hiring freeze until the first quarter of this year.

After Meta took the lead in starting layoffs in November last year, the HR department was the largest number of job layoffs. According to Interface News, 6,000 Meta recruitment employees have been laid off, and half of the technical layoffs.

Meta takes a departmental and group layoff approach, and if a project is cut, the group's software development engineers, data scientists and data engineers will leave accordingly. According to a new report, Meta may start a large number of departures from middle managers, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg hints at revising the management structure.

Some of the Lacked Meta employees said they didn't receive Zuckerberg's promised severance pay, only eight weeks' base pay and three months of health insurance for the unemployed (COBRA). These employees are mainly part of Meta's Sourcer Development Program, which is a new short-term worker hired by Meta last year.

Another tech giant with more controversial layoffs is Twitter, where former CEO Musk has said that he will give Twitter employees 3 months of severance pay, but some people complain that they only receive 1 month. According to CNBC, Twitter's number of full-time active employees has dwindled to about 1,300, including fewer than 550 full-time engineers.

Industrial talent flows back to academia

Combined with the current situation, it can be judged that although the number of layoffs of US technology giants and small and medium-sized technology companies has reached tens of thousands, the positions cut are generally related to weak technology. Gartner, the world's leading IT research and consulting firm, believes that the layoffs of technology companies will eventually ease, while the shortage of technical talent will continue. According to Gartner, tech workers ultimately have job options.

In fact, according to the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Statistics (BLS), research firms, and tech industry associations such as CompTIA, there are currently about 200,000 tech job openings in the United States. This means that tech companies that fire tech talent are releasing them into a hungry labor market, where small and medium-sized employers begin to prepare to grab the best talent from the big factories.

Indeed, the popular online job site, released a list of the 25 best jobs in the U.S. this week, with full-stack developers topping the list with a median annual salary of $130,000. Eight technical jobs were in the top 10 on this year's list, up from just two on last year's list.

As in last year's list, tech jobs continue to lead the way in terms of salary, with the top 4 highest-paying roles in the top 10 all in technology: data science director ($174,820 median annual salary), machine learning engineer ($153252), site reliability engineer ($153134), and back-end developer ($148827).

Indeed's list of the top 10 best jobs in the U.S. released this week Source: Indeed, a popular job search site

Indeed notes in the report, "Even if the market is volatile, the demand for tech workers doesn't seem to go away, nor will the industry's signature high salaries." ”

Another rare trend is the return of U.S. industrial talent to academia. Professor Chen Yiran of Duke University said on Weibo that unlike the bleak clouds in the industry, the faculty market in North American universities has been extremely hot recently, and recruitment is all about "heaps". Since the wave of layoffs in Silicon Valley began last November, the mainstream narrative of the massive loss of academic research talent to well-paid industries has begun to enter a "transition period."