Big tech job cuts will hit NYC

NEW YORK - When you hear big tech companies are cutting tens of thousands of jobs, it sounds like economic doom, like the industry is collapsing, but that is not the case at all.

Economic experts say big tech is reducing its workforce which ballooned during the pandemic.

Greg David is the Director of the Business and Economics Reporting Program at CUNY.  He is also a contributor to The City news website. He says now big tech has to cut back.

"Some of those companies hired 50 and 75 thousand people in the last two years," David says.

Hiring sprees by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook parent, Meta during the pandemic led to what experts call a bloated workforce.

Over the past few months, some of the big tech companies have announced they will be eliminating more than 50,000 jobs worldwide between the four of them.

David says even with the layoffs, the companies are still better off than prior to the pandemic.

"All of them.  All of them will have more employees when they're done with these cutbacks than they had when the pandemic began," David says.

The music streaming service Spotify just announced it is cutting about 600 jobs from its global workforce.

David Lewis is the CEO of Operations Inc, one of the largest human resources consulting firms in the country.

He says the layoff numbers in big tech sound worse than they actually are.

"Many of these jobs were actually not filled yet," Lewis says. "So they're cutting headcount planned, that they had planned to hire versus actual people in some instances."

And, he says most of those laid off in the past couple of months have already landed new jobs.

"If you go ahead and take a look online at the major online job boards, you will still find immense demand for people in all sectors, particularly in tech," Lewis says.

Experts estimate the cutbacks will eliminate about 1,500 jobs in New York City.