Microsoft, GitLab and others latest to make job cuts • The Register

It’s been another bad week for tech pros, amid more bleeding from an industry feeling the pressure of inflation and higher interest rates, as Microsoft, Zoom and Yahoo all handed out the pink slips.

Microsoft, which confirmed last month that it intends to cut 5 percent, or about 10,000 heads, of its workforce, today began laying off employees across its Surface, HoloLens, and Xbox teams.

The number of Microsofties being released into the wild is unclear, but talkative guys familiar with the situation told Bloomberg that in the case of the crew behind the mixed reality hardware goggles, it’s enough to cast doubt on whether a third generation is built. Microsoft said it remains committed to the product set.

Job losses in the Xbox unit are said to come from the marketing department and the gaming ecosystem group.

Microsoft-owned GitHub is also cutting costs as about 10 percent of its 3,500 employees are laid off. The code-hosting platform has hired around 1,000 new employees over the past 22 months and now, like others, is facing some sort of pandemic billing.

Not to mention, GitLab has also confirmed that it is cutting 7 percent of its employee base, which translates to just over 110 jobs. CEO Sid Sijbrandij said customers are “more conservative” about their spending.

“The current macroeconomic environment is difficult,” he said. “I had hoped that reprioritizing our spending would be enough to weather the deepening global economic downturn. Unfortunately, we need to take further steps to balance our pace of spending with our commitment to responsible growth.”

Earlier this week, both Dell and Zoom announced that they have decided to reduce their workforce to counter current business conditions. Both benefited from the pandemic, but for different reasons: Dell surfed the device spending boom and Zoom was at the forefront of web conferencing demand.

Zoom is laying off 15 percent, or 1,300 employees, and Dell is laying off up to 5 percent of the 133,000 employees who were on its payroll in fiscal 2022.

Along with the cloud, device, and video conferencing sectors, chipmakers are also cutting back their resources to meet the slowing demand they have forecast for the past few years. Intel is laying off people in a nod to falling shipments, Yangtze Memory is making its own moves, and Micron is cutting its workforce by around 10 percent.

Micron is also cutting executive salaries by up to 20 percent, according to a filing with the SEC yesterday.

Even hits from the past are trying to keep up with the trend. Yahoo, which dropped the exclamation mark from its branding [! – Ed], reportedly plans to cut 20 percent, or 1,600 jobs, at its 8,000-strong company. For those not keeping up, 90 percent of Yahoo was sold by Verizon to Apollo Global Management in September 2021.

Much of the tech industry has benefited from the pandemic as people have been forced to work, study and play at home. Many recruited heavily and, while remaining profitable, are attempting to shed overhead. According to Layoff.fyi, around 55,000 IT employees lost their jobs in January alone.

That number has risen to well over 200,000 since early 2022, with big contributions from Amazon (18,000) and Alphabet (12,000, and more are being requested by a shareholder).

These industry players may be gambling with more than their short-term profits. According to research by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of South Carolina, a 1 percent reduction in the workforce can result in a 31 percent increase in voluntary employee turnover the following year. ®