If you’ve looked at any of the headlines relating to business and/or technology recently, you must have noticed that the tech industry has experienced mass layoffs across some of the biggest companies in the world. To name just a few, Amazon, Unity, Salesforce, DoorDash, and Meta have all laid off significant numbers of people. Just today, Microsoft announced they’ll be letting go ten thousand people, some of whom found out today they no longer have a job.
My LinkedIn feed is full of people with posts about losing their jobs, just one after another. It doesn’t seem like there’s any other topic on that site.
For a while, at least during the summer, it seemed like maybe the video game industry would be immune to this but I’ve seen a few job losses in my industry too. It started off with some smaller studios having to let go some people but now, even Microsoft has decided to cut jobs at some of their studios, including those who worked on Halo and Gears of War.
From a personal point of view, I am astounded that none of this seems to have affected my current employer. EA used to be the leader in layoffs during every financial quarter during the very lean and dark years of the early 2010s. My co-workers and I would fear the end of each financial quarter, because that’s when the layoffs would most likely happen. I survived countless cuts but even I got laid off twice from the company I work for now.
I am not saying no one has been laid off in the last twelve months from my company but if it has happened, it hasn’t been the hundreds of people that used to get axed every year. We used to read about whole teams losing their jobs on the Internet, before the official e-mail even was sent to the rest of the employees. That is not happening now.
It oddly feels safe to be where I am now as thousands of people worldwide struggle to find new work in the tech industry. This is a bizzaro world because a decade ago, I was the one who was always on shaky ground and the Amazons and Microsofts of the world were source of the stable jobs. How is it this has flipped now?
Of course, since I wrote about this now, I have jinxed myself. Our quarterly financial results will be released on January 31, in less than two weeks. I have tempted fate by writing this post, let’s see what happens.