PC: Forbes

Only 9% of the people surveyed were confident in their employment security in a survey conducted in June.

A number of headlines this week mention hiring freezes, job offers being rescinded, and mass layoffs from tech giants as well as burgeoning upstarts, including Robinhood and Oracle.

More than 32,000 people have been laid off from U.S. tech firms in 2022, according to Crunchbase.

Yesterday’s new attitude in the job market marked a 180-degree shift from just months ago, Rick Chen, head of PR for Blind. As recently as March, about 80% of tech workers were confident in the job market and were considering looking for a new job.

News of layoffs across several industries has caused some worry among tech workers, especially those in the e-commerce, real estate, and stock market industries, which had prospered with Covid’s recovery in 2021, but saw massive volatility with the recent financial crisis.

Employees are very worried about layoffs as there have been many at companies recently. When the Blind survey, which was taken on June 20 and 21, was finished, it was discovered that those companies with the highest shares of worried workers included Compass (95%), where people have become more nervous about their job security in the past year. Twitter (91%), Robinhood (90%), Instacart (90%), and Coinbase (83%) also make this list.

When hiring freezes and layoffs doubled in the first quarter of 2022, and recession searches jumped by fifteen times their numbers from the year before, Chen noted.

Tech workers are being snapped up despite layoffs


Economic forecasters agree that strong indicators like a low unemployment rate exist side-by-side with so-called broader pessimism. Yet, hiring and job quits are high, while June layoffs are well below 1% of the labor force.

Chen says tech workers are still well positioned to find a new job or re-enter the job market if laid off, even if they do not have as much bargaining power as early 2022.

Blind’s recruiting marketplace shows that companies are still hiring, and the people we place are snapped up in weeks. 64% of tech leaders said in June that it was difficult or more difficult to find qualified applicants for the open positions, according to a CNBC survey.

As an engineering project manager with Apple, Alister Shirazi, 34, works on a contract basis. Even though his contract will expire at the end of November, he’s not at all worried about continuing to work for the tech giant or even trying to line up a new job.

For one, he noticed her boss continues to talk about how hard it is to hire and retain employees in order to keep her team properly staffed. Shirazi is optimistic that he will get a contract extension or else he will be brought on as a full-time employee.

He also sees recent layoffs as temporary: “We just came off of a huge boom in hiring in the tech sector,” Shirazi says. “Booms are usually followed by busts, but then busts are followed again by booms.”

Expecting already established companies to come out on top, Shirazi said that riskier startups may begin to be able to pay higher salaries to retain their employees. He said,“I don’t see these layoffs as a time where people are going to spend a lot of time sitting at home,” he says.

Your new job: How to future-proof it


If you’re contemplating a move, Chen advises you to reflect on what you want most from your career. “During good times, people were leaving every 12 to 18 months on average and searching for roles with higher pay and compensation,” he says. “Now is a good time to take stock of what matters most to you, whether that’s work-life balance, remote work, a flexible work schedule or opportunities to level up in your skills or career.”

Consider asking additional questions to determine a prospective company’s stability: “Beware of descriptions like ‘hyper-growth’ in the job description and dig deeper,” says Ginny Cheng, a Career Contessa coach. “Learn more about the steps they are doing to support employee retention or how they are growing responsibly.”

For the future of tech jobs, “every company is a tech company”, Chen says, “and they need programmers and data scientists and product creators to produce digital products and services. The market for these kinds of roles is robust”.