Allison Croisant, a data scientist with about a decade of experience in technology, was laid off by PayPal earlier this year, joining the masses of unemployed across her industry. Croisant has one word to describe the process of looking for a job right now: “Insane.”
“Everybody else is also getting laid off,” said Croisant, who lives in Omaha, Nebraska, where she worked remotely for PayPal.
Her sentiment is reflected in the numbers. Since the start of the year, more than 50,000 workers have been laid off from over 200 tech companies, according to tracking website Layoffs.fyi. It’s a continuation of the predominant theme of 2023 when more than 260,000 workers across nearly 1,200 tech companies lost their jobs.
Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft have all taken part in the downsizing this year, along with eBay, Unity Software, SAP, and Cisco. Wall Street has largely cheered on the cost-cutting, sending many tech stocks to record highs on optimism that spending discipline coupled with efficiency gains from artificial intelligence will lead to rising profits. PayPal announced in January that it was eliminating 9% of its workforce, or about 2,500 jobs.
For the tens of thousands of people in Croisant’s position, the path toward reemployment is daunting. All told, 2023 was the second-biggest year of cuts on record in the technology sector, behind only the dot-com crash in 2001, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Not since the spectacular flameouts of Pets.com, eToys, and Webvan have so many tech workers lost their jobs in such a short period of time.
Last month’s job cut count was the highest of any February since 2009 when the financial crisis forced companies into cash preservation mode.
CNBC spoke to a dozen people who have been laid off from tech jobs in the past year or so about their experiences navigating the labor market. Some spoke on the condition that CNBC not use their names or write about the details of their situation. Taken together, they paint a picture of an increasingly competitive market with job listings that include exacting requirements for qualification and come with lower pay than their prior gigs.
It’s a particularly confounding situation for software developers and data scientists, who just a couple of years ago had some of the most marketable and highly valued skills on the planet, and are now considering whether they need to exit the industry to find employment.
“The market isn’t what it once was,” Roger Lee, creator of Layoffs.fyi, said in an email. “To secure a new position, many salespeople and recruiters are leaving tech entirely. Even engineers are compromising — accepting roles with less stability, a tougher work environment, or lower pay and benefits.”
Lee said tech salaries have “largely stagnated” in the last two years, citing data from Comprehensive.io, a compensation tracker he recently helped launch.
Croisant’s job search involved applying for some positions that had racked up hundreds of applicants. She could see that data using LinkedIn’s Talent Insights platform, which shows how many people are vying for an open role.
Additionally, some listings required applicants to have advanced degrees or professional experience in machine learning and artificial intelligence, a new development in Croisant’s experience on the job market.
During five weeks of job hunting, Croisant said she applied to 48 openings and landed two interviews. She finally opted to accept a lower-level data analyst role and a roughly $3,000 reduction in her base pay to take a contract role starting next month at a financial technology company.
“This was an absolutely terrifying experience for me, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever truly feel secure in a job again,” Croisant said. “But I’m still one of the lucky ones in the end. I have friends who’ve been looking for months and still haven’t found anything.”
‘It’s humbling’
Krysten Powers was laid off in January from travel tech startup Flyr after two years in marketing at the company. She said navigating the current labor market is like a full-time job, “sometimes even harder.”
“You’re putting out resumes and getting almost immediate rejections,” said Powers, who’s worked in marketing for a decade. “It does take a toll on your confidence and you get this sort of imposter syndrome.”
Powers lives with her husband and two kids in the small town of Natchez, Mississippi. A month before she lost her job, her family bought a new house. Powers said moving isn’t an option, and she’s only considering remote roles in marketing. However, she is willing to accept a pay cut.
“It’s humbling for sure,” she said.
The same dynamics are playing out across the industry, even for former employees of Google, which was long considered the home of Silicon Valley’s elite talent.
Christopher Fong, who worked at Google from 2006 to 2015, is the founder of a group called Xoogler.co, which seeks to provide help for people laid off from the internet company. The 9-year-old organization, consisting of thousands of Google alumni and current staffers, offers peer support and hundreds of in-person events.
In January, Google eliminated several hundred positions across its hardware, central engineering, and Google Assistant teams. A year earlier, the company cut 12,000 jobs or roughly 6% of its full-time workforce.
Fong said the “biggest challenge” today for many ex-Google employees is finding a job that maintains their previous level of pay.
Michael Kascsak, who was laid off by Google in March of last year, took a different approach to his job search.
Kascsak said he welcomed a pay cut to start as head of talent acquisition for veterinary business CityVet in January after applying for hundreds of jobs. He acknowledged that his previous employer had set exceptionally high compensation expectations.
“I went into this knowing I had been fortunate to work at a company that paid at the top percentile and I’m a realist. I prepared myself to be flexible,” said Kascsak, who lives in Austin, Texas, and previously worked in talent sourcing for Google. “I’m fine with the pay now because I’m in the environment I want to be in with great people.”
Tech is a notable outlier in a labor market that’s been largely steady over the past two years. Nationwide, the unemployment rate ticked up to 3.9% in February from 3.7% in each of the prior three months. It’s been mostly in that range since early 2022. The U.S. economy added 275,000 jobs in February, topping 200,000 for a third straight month.
Booming market for AI engineers
Sentiment indexes are mixed. Job review website Glassdoor’s Employee Confidence Index, which gauges how employees feel about their employer’s six-month business outlook, sank to its lowest level in February since its sentiment data first began in 2016. Among tech workers, discussions about layoffs on Glassdoor have more than quadrupled in the past two years and were up 12% last month compared with a year earlier.
However, ZipRecruiter’s Job Seeker Confidence Index has been rising since mid-2023 and increased to its highest level in the fourth quarter since the second quarter of 2022.
Even within tech, there’s a vast divide in the current market. Lee of Layoffs.fyi said AI is driving a “return to rapid hiring and expansion,” even as layoffs continue elsewhere. Salaries for AI engineers rose 12% from the third to the fourth quarter last year, and the average salary for a senior AI engineer nationally is more than $190,000, according to Comprehensive.io.
Amit Mittal has been on both sides of the employment market — previously as a hiring manager and now as a job seeker.
In November, Mittal was laid off from AI lending company Upstart, where he worked as a software engineering manager, often overseeing interviews. Mittal said he witnessed the hiring process become “a lot more demanding” as layoffs surged.
“There was a lot more pressure on us to basically raise the bar higher and higher,” he said. “Somebody with a four-year experience in the past would have had a pretty good chance at getting a good job. But now they’re competing against people who have six, seven, eight years of experience for the same position.”
Mittal, who’s from India and has lived in the Chicago area since 2007, has lately been subject to a very different kind of pressure. Under his H-1B visa, Mittal had only 60 days from the official end of his employment to find a new job in the tech industry in order to stay in the country.
“If for four months, I have to pay my bills by driving an Uber or working at McDonald’s flipping burgers, that’s fine,” he said. “But that mechanism doesn’t exist for me.”
Mittal has now successfully petitioned to obtain a separate B-2 tourist visa, giving him an extra six months to find new employment. It wasn’t a cheap effort, though. He estimated he spent around $8,000 on legal and administrative costs tied to his submission.
All the while, Mittal said he’s applied for about 110 jobs to no avail. He attributed the dearth of success to employers’ reluctance or inability to sponsor visa holders.
“It seems like the possibilities are pretty slim right now, even though I see hundreds of postings every single day,” Mittal said.
Bill Vezey was laid off by eBay in January following a 13-year career as a software engineer at the online retailer. He said he’s learning the rules of the “new game,” and they’re much different than he remembers.
“Attainability is not just a numbers game,” said Vezey, 64, who lives in Santa Cruz, California. “It is a combination of how well you brand yourself, about your access through networking to any given position — to the hidden job market.”
Vezey said he hopes to be rehired at his longtime employer and wants to remain in tech.
“I am kind of an incurable optimist, despite what 60-odd years of living have brought,” he said.
Like many of those who spoke to CNBC, Powers said she spends her days tailoring her resume for openings, scanning online job boards, and applying for newly posted positions. She networks by contacting a recruiter or hiring manager connected to each role, though she said some recruiters have ghosted her as quickly as they’ve expressed interest.
She’s had a few interviews and turned down one job offer. That position would’ve required her to go to an office while taking a more than 50% pay cut from her previous job. And she’d have to find child care.
“There’s a sense of impending doom,” Powers said. “There is a point where the money runs out and the options become really bleak.”
Still, Powers said she’s trying to stay optimistic, “because giving up is not going to get me a job.”
Data just released by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission exposes a clear gender pay gap, with men outearning women, especially in the highest-paid jobs. The gap is widest for women of color.
This week, the EEOC released aggregated pay data collected from businesses in 2017 and 2018. To make this information accessible to everyone, the organization also launched a new interactive tool that lets people find wage information by gender, location, race, and job type. It’s the first time that the EEOC has released pay data.
The gender disparity is most egregious at the top of the pay scale, where men constitute a whopping three-quarters of individuals earning over $208,000. Even within the second highest pay bracket, with salaries between $163,000 and $207,000, a striking 71% of the earners are men. Conversely, women are the majority on the lower end, making up 59% of those with incomes below $19,000.
The data also highlight how women of color are particularly disadvantaged. In 2018, across every racial group, women earned less on average than their male counterparts. Black women and American Indian or Alaska Native women had the lowest median earnings, ranging from $19,200 to $24,400.
In 2018, the median salary range for men was a full pay band above that for women, with men's average earnings falling between $39,000 and $49,900 versus $30,600 to $38,900 for women. (The data was reported by the companies to the EEOC in pay ranges or bands, so the summary data is also presented in ranges).
The EEOC collected the pay data in 2017 and 2018 from private employers and certain federal contractors with 100 or more employees. They aggregated the data representing over 100 million workers and 70,000 employers.
As part of the data release, the EEOC created an interactive dashboard where anyone can examine the median pay by gender, state, job category, industry, and race. For example, one could search for the pay of Black men and women in California who are professionals in the arts and entertainment industry. The EEOC also shared the following key insights from its own examination of the data, highlighting some disappointing disparities:
- Hawaii was the only state where the median salary range for both men and women matched. Wyoming was the state with the worst pay gap, with women compensated a whopping four pay bands behind men.
- Only in administrative support and service jobs did women's median earnings equal men's. In the eight other job categories, men's median pay was higher, with men's median earnings in two pay ranges higher in six of the categories.
- Men's median pay range was higher than women's in all industries except accommodation and food services.
There were no states, jobs, or industries where women outearned their male counterparts.
The data was initially collected to help the EEOC enforce equal pay laws. “The lack of access to pay data absent a specific charge of discrimination has been a longstanding barrier in the agency’s efforts to enforce federal laws prohibiting pay discrimination. In 2010, the National Equal Pay Enforcement Taskforce recommended that the EEOC consider collecting pay information to support the agency’s law enforcement efforts,” the EEOC explained as part of the data release.
The disclosure requirement for companies referred to as Form EEO-1 Component 2, was discontinued in 2019 by the Trump administration. As a result, the EEOC only has pay data from 2017 and 2018.
The National Partnership for Women & Families President, Jocelyn C. Frye, pointed out in a statement on the data release that women have come a long way since 1963 when the Equal Pay Act became law, and women were paid 59 cents for every dollar a man earned.
“We should view Equal Pay Day as an important moment to challenge the misperception that women’s choices are to blame for pay inequities–and to rededicate ourselves to the mission of eradicating America’s gender wage gaps once and for all,” Frye said.
Dell has had a hybrid working culture in place for more than a decade — long before the pandemic struck.
"Dell cared about the work, not the location," a senior employee at Dell who's worked remotely for more than a decade, told Business Insider last month. "I would say 10% to 15% of every team was remote."
That flexibility has enabled staff to sustain their careers in the face of major life changes, several employees told BI. It has also helped Dell to be placed on the "Best Place to Work for Disability Equality Index" since 2018.
But in February Dell introduced a strict return-to-office mandate, with punitive measures for those who want to stay at home.
Under the new policy, staff were told that from May almost all will be classified as either "hybrid," or "remote."
Hybrid workers will be required to come into an "approved" office at least 39 days a quarter — the equivalent of about three days a week, internal documents seen by BI show.
If they want to keep working from home, staff can opt to go fully remote. But that option has a downside: fully remote workers will not be considered for promotion, or be able to change roles.
The memo states: "For remote team members, it is important to understand the trade-offs: Career advancement, including applying to new roles in the company, will require a team member to reclassify as hybrid onsite."
"The entire company has been complaining about this behind closed doors," said one Dell staffer, who works alongside senior management. The employee asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals.
Dell told BI in a statement that "in-person connections paired with a flexible approach are critical to drive innovation and value differentiation."
The approach differs from founder and CEO Michael Dell's previous support for remote workers.
In 2021, he told CRN that the company's expanded homeworking culture was "absolutely here to stay." The billionaire later criticized companies that were enforcing RTO, writing on LinkedIn: "If you are counting on forced hours spent in a traditional office to create collaboration and provide a feeling of belonging within your organization, you're doing it wrong."
His office did not respond to a request for comment from BI.
By 2022, the company line had not changed: "A long-term ambition for Dell Technologies is for 60% of our workforce to operate remotely on any given day."
But in March 2023, Dell started to change its policies with a new mandate ordering all staff living within an hour of offices to come in at least three days a week, CRN reported.
Professor Cary Cooper, an organizational psychologist and cofounder of the National Forum for Health and Wellbeing at work, says Dell's pivot could be a "panicked reaction to a world economy that's not very buoyant."
"When that occurs, people turn inwards. They think, maybe if we brought everybody in, it'll make a difference. We'll perform better," Cooper told BI.
"Senior execs somehow think that people in the office are more productive than at home, even though there's no evidence to back that up."
There's also a "pack mentality" at play, says Cooper, with tech companies trying to follow what everybody else is doing, rather than continue with what has worked for them.
"First on the chopping block"
Frustrated workers at Dell spoke out anonymously to BI about how the new policy would affect them.
One said: "We're being forced into a position where either we're going to be staying as the low man on the totem pole, first on the chopping block when it comes to workforce reduction, or we can be hybrid and go in multiple days a week, which really affects a lot of us."
The staffer said she and many colleagues were hired on remote contracts during the pandemic.
The Dell worker lives about a 45-minute drive from the nearest office and works 10-hour shifts four days a week. However, traveling there would be virtually impossible given she no longer drives following a car crash.
She said many of her colleagues would find it very challenging to get to the office three days a week.
One Dell worker is already feeling the effects of the new policy.
Dell's list of "approved" sites includes 17 offices in the US and 26 globally — but not the senior employee's nearest office. "I now know I have no office. So I am remote, or I move if I want to stay."
BI has viewed a promotion offer sent to the long-serving remote worker around the same time as the RTO mandate was announced.
To accept that promotion, the employee would not only have to start coming into the office but move the state to be near an "approved" site.
Geographically divided teams
Employees also say that Dell's claims about fostering "in-person connection" do not add up.
It is common for teams at Dell to be spread around the US and even other countries, according to BI's senior source at Dell, who works across the organization and has access to employee data.
"Every team has people in at least two states, some in three or four. I can't think of one team where everyone is in one location," the person said.
That means that even if commuting distances are feasible, many won't be able to collaborate face-to-face with their teams in the same office.
Another Dell worker told BI: "I would support that if I actually had team members that were local and would actually go on-site. With us being so spread out around the United States, there's really no point in us going in. I'm going to be in a room with a bunch of people who don't know how to do my job or how to help me."
BI's senior source at Dell used their access to pull data about the composition of remote teams.
"I deal with many many teams across our business. Every team I work with has at least one person if not two or three affected by this policy," said the senior source at Dell.
"They are overwhelmingly women. This new policy on its face appears to be anti-remote, but in practice will be anti-woman."
Workers who spoke to BI also said they believe the new measures are a way to push some employees out — a phenomenon known as "quiet firing."
"This level of micromanagement makes me want to leave Dell," one said, adding that since the announcement was made, dozens of staff have been discussing quitting in Discord chats.
Two other staff including one based in Germany who spoke to BI also said many people were now considering leaving Dell.
In February last year, Dell laid off about 5% of its workforce, or about 6,600 jobs, per an SEC filing, in the wake of poor PC sales.
"It's not about culture. Period," the senior Dell worker agreed. "There are headcount cuts that need to happen and we are suffering. If people leave on their own, they don't have to pay out severance."
Cooper agreed that the level of control in this policy would result in some resignations.
"An important source of ill health in the workplace is people feeling they don't have control and autonomy over their job," he said. "If they're downsizing, maybe they're saying, well, the people are prepared who are not prepared to come into the office. Well, they can go elsewhere."
Dell's move is one of the most abrupt changes to remote work policies largely introduced when the pandemic struck. Its progress will contribute to the debate over the future of work and whether working culture will evolve for good.