Tech layoffs continue to affect Silicon Valley’s workers by the thousands with companies including Yahoo and Zoom among the most recent to make layoffs.
The tech and biotech industries have reached a milestone of 20,000 positions that have been or are projected to be cut in the Bay Area layoffs, according to an article published by The Mercury News on Feb. 14.
Among the people who have been laid off is San Jose State alumnus, Shreyam, who requested to be referred to by his first name for security reasons. He graduated from SJSU in 2020 with a master’s in software engineering.
Shreyam said he was working for the data and cloud company NetApp, when it announced a cut of 8% of its global workforce at the end of January.
He said his experience is a pressing issue for those who are in the U.S. on a work visa.
“Even though there are openings, the job market is saturated with talented professionals due to the massive layoffs, so the competition is high for each open role,” Shreyam said. “Along with that, candidates on a temporary visa like an H-1B or F-1, have only a few weeks to find a job, or else they lose their visa status and cannot stay in the country.”
H-1B is a worker’s visa that allows companies to employ non-citizens to live and work in the U.S., according to a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services webpage.
F-1 visas are given to foreign students and allow them to live and study in the U.S. without citizenship, according to the same webpage.
Shreyam said he spends his days connecting with his network and preparing for interviews to reenter the workforce.
Once an employee under a H-1B visa loses their job, they have 60 days to regain lawful citizenship status, according to a Visa Nation webpage.
He said his advice to students is to keep making connections and continue to invest in skills of their own to stay relevant and attractive regardless of job trends.
“All industries have ups and downs,” Shreyam said. “We stay relevant by working hard and working smart.”
SJSU accounting associate professor Caroline Chen said workers are a tech company’s biggest expense.
She said salaries and benefits are no longer a part of the equation when companies lay workers off.
“It gives you the biggest bang for your buck to cut people because you don’t have to pay them benefits,” Chen said. “You don’t have to pay the government social security or Medicare anymore, or the state government.”
Chen said because of the off-loading of positions, the workloads from the laid off employees are shoveled onto the salaried employees, who make the same amount of money regardless of the extra time working.
“You’re just going to basically tell [workers], do your job plus 50% of somebody else’s job,” she said. “Otherwise, you’ll lose your job.”
Chen said layoffs in tech make up a very small portion of overall employment in the U.S., and that the unemployment rate is at the lowest it’s been in 50 years, as announced by President Joe Biden on Jan. 6.
There has been more than 93,000 workers laid off by U.S. based tech companies in 2023, according to a Feb. 17 article by Crunchbase News.
Engineering professor Ahmed Banafa said nobody really knows when the layoffs will end, but that there’s been a tonal shift in how some of these companies are choosing to operate, moving towards maximum efficiency over keeping long-term employees.
“The new tone I am hearing from the companies and specifically from the CEOs of the companies is efficiency,” Banafa said. “Meaning we will look at doing more with less employees, because inflation is impacting the spending of the customers.”
Banafa also said Silicon Valley “reinvents itself”, and it is always finding fresh ideas to get behind, regardless of the amount of jobs being lost.
