This story originally appeared on Business Insider.
Layoffs continue to sweep the tech industry, but some companies have brutally axed a bigger portion of their workforce than others.
Twitter remains the most cutthroat as 80% of its employees got the chop. Around 6,300 workers out of the 7,800 it had in 2022 have been let go since billionaire Elon Musk took control of the company in October.
Percentage of big tech staff layoffs since 2022
Business Insider
According to Insider analysis, Meta follows after announcing cuts that amount to almost a quarter of its workforce, which was around 87,000 staff in 2022. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced cuts of 11,000 jobs in November, then a further cut of 10,000 in March.
Our analysis doesn’t include the third round of Meta job cuts which began this week, reportedly numbering in the thousands. Insider’s Kali Hays and Thomas Maxwell reported that management roles have been heavily affected by this newest round of cuts. Technical product managers in Reality Labs, Facebook, and Instagram were included in the running list of impacted roles.
Mark Zuckerberg appeared to admit in his first layoffs memo to staff to over-hiring during the pandemic in response to people spending more time online. He said he mistakenly took the decision to ramp up its investments, but it “did not play out” the way he’d anticipated.
Number of big tech jobs cut since 2022
Business Insider
Other firms have also gone through multiple rounds of layoffs.
Amazon said it was laying off 11,000 staff members in January, and a further 9,000 job cuts in March. This amounts to 7% of its overall corporate headcount of 380,000 in 2022. That figure doesn’t include Amazon’s warehouse workers.
Hawkish tech execs say these job cuts were a long time coming.
The prominent tech investor and PayPal mafia member Keith Rabois recently claimed that thousands of Meta and Google workers did “fake work” after the companies went on a hiring frenzy during the pandemic. Rabois also said that big firms dumping workers was to be expected as they were responsible for hiring too many people.
Rabois also called out revenue per employee as a useful metric to calculate a firm’s bloat. A recent Insider analysis shows that revenue per employee dropped at many of the major tech firms now chopping jobs. Meta’s workforce inflated by 143% from 2018 to 2022, but revenue per employee fell 14% over that time.
Zuckerberg appeared to be thinking along similar lines to Rabois, talking up Meta’s “year of efficiency” in February.
“We’re in a different environment now where a lot of what we do, it makes sense to focus on the efficiency a lot more than we had previously and make sure we can work effectively,” he said.
