SAN JOSE, California — The ax fell suddenly and out of the blue for technology worker Nitesh Donti. Less than a year ago, on the networking platform LinkedIn, he’d expressed excitement over his new job as an engineering manager at robot-vehicle company Nuro. Then last month, Nuro laid off Donti and around 300 others as it slashed 20% of its workforce.
“It was a complete shock,” said Donti, 30, of San Francisco, who’d spent five years as a software engineer at Google before moving to the Mountain View-based Nuro.
He was among the thousands of tech workers laid off since October as companies responded to slowing revenue growth, rising inflation and interest rates, and worries of a coming recession. It’s no surprise these tech employees were shocked when the bad news came: Their industry was going gangbusters until it wasn’t, with think-tank Joint Venture Silicon Valley in February reporting that “Silicon Valley’s innovation engine is red hot” and tech was leading a return in employment to pre-pandemic levels.
Now, nearly 8,000 tech and biotech workers have lost their jobs at companies including Facebook-parent Meta, Oracle, Twitter, Lyft, Roku, Seagate, PayPal and GoFundMe in layoffs big enough to trigger regulatory notification, and many more have been let go in smaller layoffs. This week, San Francisco on-demand delivery company DoorDash announced 1,250 corporate-job cuts.