People take selfies in front of the logo of Facebook parent company Meta on November 9, 2022 in Menlo Park, California. Meta will lay off more than 11,000 staff, the company said on Wednesday.
Liu Guanguan | China News Service | Getty Images
The seemingly breathless pace of layoffs across the tech sector may seem staggering. In November alone, the 76,835 layoffs were nearly double from October.
But the total number, year to date, is the second lowest on record, according to a report by Challenger, Gray & Christmas which has been tracking job cuts since 1993.
“When we’re looking at layoffs across the board, while we have seen an uptick from the historic low layoff [numbers] we’ve [had] the last two years, we’re not seeing huge mass layoff activity,” senior vice president Andrew Challenger recently told CNBC.
At CNBC’s CFO Council Summit earlier this month in Washington, D.C., KPMG chief economist Diane Swonk waved off concerns about the recent layoffs when she said, “I’m not worried about those [tech] workers not getting jobs pretty quickly.”
With skilled workers still in demand, a growing question is where all this tech talent ultimately lands — and how long it takes. One sector making a play for it: the federal government.
Kurt DelBene, chief information officer at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, says he’s on a mission to hire the designers, engineers, and cyber talent that have been laid off by Meta, Google, Twitter and other tech firms shedding workers in the face…
