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Wages and Hiring Weigh on Minds of Company Executives

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As companies reported their latest quarterly earnings in recent weeks, hiring, wages and head counts were popular topics as analysts quizzed executives about their plans.Some said they were avoiding expanding their payrolls as rapidly as in the past. Others said that rising wages remained a worry for their bottom lines. And many still looking to hire said that attracting and retaining workers was difficult as the labor market remained robust.“You have to work extra to hire people and to keep people,” Andrew Watterson, the chief operating officer of Southwest Airlines, said on a call with analysts. “Our clients still grapple with labor shortages,” said Martine Ferland, who runs the consultancy Mercer.Even so, the rate of workers quitting their jobs, a measure of workers’ confidence in their prospects and bargaining power, continued to fall in June, according to data released Tuesday. “If you think about our turnover coming down, that means we don’t have as many people we’re hiring as we were before,” said Rick Cardenas, the chief executive of Darden Restaurants, owner of the Olive Garden chain.Wage growth has also cooled in recent months, but remained robust last month, rising 4.4 percent from a year earlier. “We still face above normal levels of wage and benefit cost inflation in our cost structure,” Andre Schulten, the finance chief at the consumer goods company Procter & Gamble, said on a call with analysts.Kathryn A. Mikells, the chief financial officer of Exxon Mobil, said that the oil giant had seen lower prices for some of its materials like chemicals and sand, but “as it relates to things where labor is a high component of the cost, I would say we’re not yet necessarily seeing that deflationary pressure coming through yet.”Anthony Wood, the chief executive of Roku, the streaming device maker, told analysts that the company would continue hiring, but planned to do so outside of the United States, in places where workers “are just less expensive than Silicon Valley engineers.”Other companies, especially in the tech industry, said that they had become more judicious about hiring, with some freezing payrolls or even cutting jobs.Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, which cut tens of thousands of jobs in multiple rounds of layoffs since late last year, said last week that “newly budgeted head count growth is going to be relatively low” at the company, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Sundar Pichai of Alphabet said that the tech giant would “continue to slow our expense growth and pace of hiring.” More

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    Tech Firms Once Powered New York’s Economy. Now They’re Scaling Back.

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    For much of the last two decades, including during the pandemic, technology companies were a bright spot in New York’s economy, adding thousands of high-paying jobs and expanding into millions of square feet of office space.Their growth buoyed tax revenue, set up New York as a credible rival to the San Francisco Bay Area — and provided jobs that helped the city absorb layoffs in other sectors during the pandemic and the 2008 financial crisis.Now, the technology industry is pulling back hard, clouding the city’s economic future.Facing many business challenges, large technology companies have laid off more than 386,000 workers nationwide since early 2022, according to layoffs.fyi, which tracks the tech industry. And they have pulled out of millions of square feet of office space because of those job cuts and the shift to working from home.That retrenchment has hurt lots of tech hubs, and San Francisco has been hit the hardest with an office vacancy rate of 25.6 percent, according to Newmark Research.New York is doing better than San Francisco — Manhattan has a vacancy rate of 13.5 percent — but it can no longer count on the technology industry for growth. More than one-third of the roughly 22 million square feet of office space available for sublet in Manhattan comes from technology, advertising and media companies, according to Newmark.Consider Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. It is now unloading a big chunk of the more than 2.2 million square feet of office space it gobbled up in Manhattan in recent years after laying off around 1,700 employees this year, or a quarter of its New York State work force. The company has opted not to renew leases covering 250,000 square feet in Hudson Yards and for 200,000 square feet on Park Avenue South.Spotify is trying to sublet five of the 16 floors it leased six years ago in 4 World Trade Center, and Roku is offering a quarter of the 240,000 square feet it had taken in Times Square just last year. Twitter, Microsoft and other technology companies are also trying to sublease unwanted space.“The tech companies were such a big part of the real estate landscape during the last five years,” said Ruth Colp-Haber, the chief executive of Wharton Property Advisors, a real estate brokerage. “And now that they seem to be cutting back, the question is: Who is going to replace them?”Ms. Colp-Haber said it could take months for bigger spaces or entire floors of buildings to be sublet. The large amount of space available for sublet is also driving down the rents that landlords are able to get on new leases.“They are going to undercut every landlord out there in terms of pricing, and they have really nice spaces that are already all built out,” she said, referring to the tech companies.The tech sector has been a driver of New York’s economy since the late-90s dot-com boom helped to establish “Silicon Alley” south of Midtown. Then, after the financial crisis, the expansion of companies like Google supported the economy when banks, insurers and other financial firms were in retreat.Spotify is trying to sublet five of the 16 floors it leased six years ago in 4 World Trade Center, right.George Etheredge for The New York TimesSmall and large tech companies added 43,430 jobs in New York in the five years through the end of 2021, a 33 percent gain, according to the state comptroller. And those jobs paid very well: The average tech salary in 2021 was $228,620, nearly double the average private-sector salary in the city, according to the comptroller.The growth in jobs fueled demand for commercial space, and tech, advertising and media companies accounted for nearly a quarter of the new office leases signed in Manhattan in recent years, according to Newmark.Microsoft and Spotify declined to comment about their decision to sublet space. Twitter and Roku did not respond to requests for comment. Meta said in a statement that it was “committed to distributed work” and was “continuously refining” its approach.A few big tech companies are still expanding in New York.Google plans to open St. John’s Terminal, a large office near the Hudson River in Lower Manhattan, early next year. Including the terminal, Google will own or lease around seven million square feet of office space in New York, up from roughly six million today, according to a company representative. (Google leases more than one million square feet of that space to other tenants.) The company has more than 12,000 employees in the New York area, up from over 10,000 in 2019.Amazon, which in 2019 canceled plans to build a large campus in Queens after local politicians objected to the incentives offered to the company, has nevertheless added 200,000 square feet of office space in New York, Jersey City and Newark since 2019. The company will have added roughly 550,000 square feet of office space later this summer, when it opens 424 Fifth Avenue, the former Lord & Taylor department store, which it bought in 2020 for $1.15 billion.“New York provides a fantastic, diverse talent pool, and we’re proud of the thousands of jobs we’ve created in the city and state over the past 10 years across both our corporate and operations functions,” Holly Sullivan, vice president of worldwide economic development at Amazon, said in a statement.And though many tech companies continue to let employees work from home for much of the week, they are also trying to woo workers back to the office, which could help reduce the need to sublet space.Salesforce, a software company that has offices in a tower next to Bryant Park, said it was not considering subletting its New York space.“Currently I’m facing the opposite problem in the tower in New York,” said Relina Bulchandani, head of real estate for Salesforce. “There has been a concerted effort to continue to grow the right roles in New York because we have a very high customer base in New York.”New York is and will remain a vibrant home for technology companies, industry representatives said.“I have not heard of a single tech company leaving, and that matters,” said Julie Samuels, the president of TECH:NYC, an industry association. “If anything, we are seeing less of a contraction in New York among tech leases than they are seeing in other large cities.”Google plans to open St. John’s Terminal, right, a new campus near the Hudson River in Lower Manhattan, early next year.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesFred Wilson, a partner at Union Square Ventures, said tech executives now felt less of a need to be in Silicon Valley, a shift that he said had benefited New York. “We have more company C.E.O.s and more company founders in New York today than we did before the pandemic,” Mr. Wilson said, referring to the companies his firm has invested in.David Falk, the president of the New York tristate region for Newmark, said, “We are right now working on several transactions with smaller, young tech firms that are looking to take sublet space.”Many firms are still pulling back, however.In 2017 and 2019, Spotify, which is based in Stockholm, signed leases totaling more than 564,000 square feet of space at 4 World Trade Center, becoming one of the largest tenants there. It soon had a space with all the accouterments you would expect at a tech firm — brightly colored flexible work areas, eye-popping views and Ping-Pong tables.But in January, Spotify said it was laying off 600 people, or about 6 percent of its global work force. The company, which allows employees to choose between working fully remotely or on a hybrid schedule, is also reducing its office space, putting five floors up for sublet.“On days when I’m by myself, I end up sitting in a meeting room all day for focus time,” said Dayna Tran, a Spotify employee who regularly works at the downtown office, adding that the employees who come in motivate themselves and create community by collaborating on an office playlist. More

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    Biden Administration Unveils Tougher Guidelines on Mergers

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    The proposed road map for regulatory reviews, last updated in 2020, includes a focus on tech platforms for the first time.The Biden administration’s top antitrust officials unveiled tougher guidelines against tech mergers on Wednesday, signaling their deepening scrutiny of the industry despite recent court losses in their attempts to block tech deal-making.Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, and Jonathan Kanter, the top antitrust official at the Department of Justice, released draft guidelines for merger reviews that for the first time include a focus on digital platforms and how dominant companies can use their scale to harm future rivals.The guidelines — which generally provide a road map for whether regulators block or approve deals — show the Biden administration’s commitment to an aggressive antitrust agenda aimed at curtailing the power of companies like Google, Meta, Apple and Amazon.The guidelines, which aren’t enforced by law, follow a losing streak in the courts. A ruling last week prevented the F.T.C. from delaying the closing of Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of the video game maker Activision Blizzard. In January, a court sided against the F.T.C. in its lawsuit to stop Meta’s purchase of Within, a virtual reality app maker.The forceful antitrust posture is a pillar of President Biden’s agenda to stamp out economic inequality and encourage greater competition. “Promoting competition to lower costs and support small businesses and entrepreneurs is a central part of Bidenomics,” a senior administration official said in a call with reporters.The new guidelines would apply to all deals across the economy. But they highlight obstacles to competition among digital platforms, including how an acquisition of a nascent rival may be intended to kill off future competition. Such deals, known as killer acquisitions, are prevalent in the tech industry and at the heart of an F.T.C. antitrust lawsuit against Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The agency has accused Meta of buying Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 to prevent future competition.The F.T.C. and Justice Department also said they would look at how companies used their scale, including their large number of users, to ward off competition. These so-called network effects have helped companies like Meta and Google maintain their dominance in social media and internet search.The agencies also laid out ways in which mergers involving “platform” businesses, the model used by Amazon’s online store and Apple’s App Store, could harm competition. An acquisition could hurt competition by giving a platform control over a significant stream of data, the draft guidelines said, echoing concerns that tech giants use their vast troves of information to squash rivals.“As markets and commercial realities change, it is vital that we adapt our law enforcement tools to keep pace so that we can protect competition in a manner that reflects the intricacies of our modern economy,” Mr. Kanter said in a statement. “Simply put, competition today looks different than it did 50 — or even 15 — years ago.”While they lack the force of law, the guidelines can influence how judges look at challenges to mergers and acquisitions. The effort to update the guidelines has been closely watched by businesses and corporate lawyers that navigate regulatory scrutiny of megadeals.The guidelines were last updated in 2020. In 2021, Mr. Biden ordered the Justice Department and the F.T.C. to update them again as part of a broader effort to improve competition across the economy. The agencies will take public comment on the proposals and could make amendments before final guidelines are adopted.“These guidelines contain critical updates while ensuring fidelity to the mandate Congress has given us and the legal precedent on the books,” Ms. Khan said in a statement.While the F.T.C. experienced the recent court losses, it has forced some companies, including the chip-maker Nvidia and the aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, to abandon some large deals. The Justice Department blocked the publisher Penguin Random House from buying Simon & Schuster, using an unusual argument that the merger would harm authors who sold the publication rights to their books. More

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    As U.S. and Chinese Officials Meet, Businesses Temper Their Hopes

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    Chief executives in the U.S. have long pushed for closer ties between the two countries. Now they just hope a rocky situation won’t get worse.In a meeting in Beijing on Friday, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, traded warm smiles with Bill Gates and praised Mr. Gates as “the first American friend” he had met this year.The encounters in Beijing between Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and his Chinese counterparts, starting on Sunday, are likely to feel noticeably chillier.The high-level meetings are aimed at getting the U.S.-China relationship back on track, and many American business leaders have been pushing the Biden administration to try to restore some stability in one of the world’s most important bilateral relationships.But for business leaders, and for officials on both sides, expectations for the meetings appear modest, with two main goals for the talks. One is to restore communication between the governments, which broke down this year after a Chinese surveillance balloon flew into U.S. airspace and Mr. Blinken canceled a visit scheduled for February. The other is to halt any further decline in the countries’ relationship.There is already evidence of the impact of the fraying ties. Foreign direct investment in China has fallen to an 18-year low. A 2023 survey by the American Chamber of Commerce in China showed that companies still see the Chinese market as a priority, but that their willingness to invest there is declining.“The economic relationship has become so dismal that any sign of progress is welcome, though expectations are low for any sort of a breakthrough,” said Jake Colvin, the president of the National Foreign Trade Council, which represents multinational businesses.“The hope is that high-level dialogues like this can start to inject some certainty for business into an increasingly fraught and unpredictable trade relationship,” he said.Still, as one of the world’s largest consumer markets and home to many factories that supply global businesses, China exerts a powerful pull. This year, as it eased its travel restrictions after three years of pandemic lockdowns, a parade of chief executives made trips to China, including Mary Barra of General Motors, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase and Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone.On a visit to China this month, Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and owner of Twitter, described the American and Chinese economies as “conjoined twins” and said he opposed to efforts to split them. Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, traveled to China in March and lauded the company’s “symbiotic” relationship with the nation.Sam Altman, the leader of OpenAI, which makes the ChatGPT chatbot, appeared virtually at a conference in Beijing this month, saying American and Chinese researchers should continue to work together to counter the risks of artificial intelligence.The tech industry, which has forged lucrative relationships with Chinese manufacturers and consumers, has warily watched Washington’s aggressive approach to China. While industry groups acknowledge the importance of moves to safeguard national security, they have urged the Biden administration to carefully calibrate its actions.Wendy Cutler, a former diplomat and trade negotiator who is now vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said the United States and China might announce some small steps forward at the end of the meetings. The governments might agree, she said, to increase the paltry number of flights between their countries or the visas they are issuing to foreign visitors.But both sides will have plenty of grievances to air, Ms. Cutler said. Chinese officials are likely to complain about U.S. tariffs on goods made in China and restrictions on U.S. firms selling coveted chip technology to China. American officials may highlight China’s deteriorating business environment and its recent move to bar companies that handle critical information from buying microchips made by the U.S. company Micron.“I’m not expecting any breakthroughs, particularly on the economic front,” Ms. Cutler said, adding, “Neither side will want to be smiling.”American officials hope Mr. Blinken’s visit paves the way for more cooperation, including on issues like climate change and the restructuring the debt loads of developing countries. Other officials, including Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen, are considering visits to China this year, and Mr. Xi and President Biden may meet directly at either the Group of 20 meetings in Delhi in September or an Asia-Pacific economic meeting in San Francisco in November.In recent months, Biden officials have tried to mend the rift between the countries by arguing for a more “constructive” relationship. They have echoed European officials in saying their desire is for “de-risking and diversifying” their economic relationships with China, not “decoupling.”But trust between the governments has eroded, and Chinese officials appear to be skeptical of how much the Biden administration can do to restore ties.The extensive U.S. restrictions on the semiconductor technology that can be shared with China, which were issued in October, continue to rankle officials in Beijing. The United States has added dozens of Chinese companies to sanctions lists for aiding the Chinese military and surveillance state, or circumventing U.S. restrictions against trading with Iran and Russia.Biden administration officials are weighing further restrictions on China, including a long-delayed order covering certain U.S. venture capital investments. And the White House faces intense pressure from Congress to do more to crack down on national security threats emanating from Beijing.Not all companies are pushing for improved ties. Some with less exposure to China have tried to reap political benefits in Washington from the growing competition with the country. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has repeatedly raised concerns about TikTok, the Chinese-owned video app that has proved a formidable competitor to Instagram.“It’s really a dispute over the degree,” said James Lewis, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “How accommodating are you? How confrontational are you?”How aggressively companies are resisting the tensions with China, Mr. Lewis said, is linked to their exposure to the country’s market.“I think a lot of this has to do with your presence in China,” he said. More

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    Meta, Facebook’s Parent, to Lay Off Another 10,000 Workers

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    It would be the tech company’s second round of cuts since November. Mark Zuckerberg, its chief executive, has declared 2023 the “year of efficiency.”Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, said on Tuesday that it planned to lay off about 10,000 employees, or roughly 13 percent of its work force, the latest move to hew to what the company’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has called a “year of efficiency.”The layoffs will affect Meta’s recruiting team this week, with a restructuring of its tech and business groups to come in April and May, Mr. Zuckerberg said in a memo posted on the company’s website. The announcement is the company’s second round of cuts within the past half year. In November, Meta laid off more than 11,000 people, or about 13 percent of its work force at the time.Meta also plans to close about 5,000 job postings that have yet to be filled, Mr. Zuckerberg said in the memo. Other restructuring efforts include a plan to wrap up this summer an analysis of Meta’s hybrid return-to-office model, which it began testing last March.“This will be tough and there’s no way around that,” he wrote.Meta’s stock rose more than 7 percent by the close of trading on Tuesday.Mr. Zuckerberg is culling employees after years of hiring at a breakneck pace. His company gobbled up workers as its family of apps, which also includes WhatsApp, became popular worldwide. The coronavirus pandemic also supercharged the use of mobile apps, leading to more growth. At its peak last year, Meta had 87,000 full-time employees.But as the global economy soured, and digital advertising markets contracted last year, Mr. Zuckerberg began putting an end to unchecked growth. Meta trimmed employee perks. And after the layoffs in November, which largely affected the business divisions and recruiting teams, Mr. Zuckerberg hinted at further cuts.On an earnings call in February, the chief executive said he did not want the company to be overstuffed with a layer of middle management, or “managers managing managers.” He said he took responsibility for last year’s layoffs, blaming his zeal for staffing up on the surge of use early in the pandemic.Meta’s layoffs are part of a wave of job cuts from the biggest tech companies. In recent months, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce and others have also said they are trimming their ranks, and some of the companies have increased the number of people they are letting go after initial announcements. Many of the companies have cited a challenging global economic environment for their actions.But even beyond the macroeconomic conditions, Meta is dealing with many challenges. It is grappling not only with a digital advertising slowdown but also with Apple’s privacy changes to its mobile operating system, which have restricted Meta’s ability to collect data on iPhone users to help target ads. It also faces steep competition from TikTok, which has soared in popularity over the past few years. And regulators have stepped up efforts to rein in the company by pushing for new laws that would limit Meta’s data collection abilities.Meta is also in the midst of a tricky transition to become a “metaverse” company, connecting people to an immersive digital world through virtual-reality headsets and applications. Mr. Zuckerberg sees the metaverse as the next-generation computing platform, so Meta has been spending billions of dollars on the effort and reallocating workers to its Reality Labs division, which is focused on products for the metaverse.Yet it’s unclear if people will want to use metaverse products. In recent months, the public has instead gravitated to chatbots, which are built on artificial intelligence. Meta has invested in A.I. for years but lately has not been at the center of the conversation about the technology.Employees have been bracing for more layoffs for months, watching with anxiety as Mr. Zuckerberg embarked on a quest to dial back what he felt was no longer necessary to run the company, according to current and former employees. But the expectation was that he would take a light touch to his favored project of the metaverse.Some Meta employees who were affected by Tuesday’s announcement of layoffs — especially in the recruiting division — felt “gut-punched,” according to current and former employees who have spoken with those in the organization.“People are entering a job market that is the worst I’ve ever seen,” said Erin Sumner, a global director of human resources at DeleteMe, who was laid off from Facebook in November. She said the staggered nature of Meta’s cuts over the next two months was adding to employee anxiety.“There’s a lot of uncertainty,” Ms. Sumner said. “There’s a lot of anger, and there’s the question many folks are asking: ‘How do you expect me to do work for the next two months while wondering if I will still have a job?’”In his announcement on Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg laid out a vision for streamlining the company by removing layers of management, ending lower-priority projects and rebalancing product teams with a focus on engineering.To that end, Mr. Zuckerberg wound down efforts on building NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, a cryptocurrency-based initiative that has dropped out of favor in recent months. Many of Mr. Zuckerberg’s crypto initiatives in general have fallen by the wayside over the past nine months as the public has grown more skeptical of the market after the implosion of FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange.In his note, Mr. Zuckerberg added that the moves were a response to global conditions, including increased regulation, geopolitical instability, higher interest rates and a cooling economy.“The world economy changed, competitive pressures grew and our growth slowed considerably,” he said. “We should prepare ourselves for the possibility that this new economic reality will continue for many years.”Gregory Schmidt More

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    Computer Science Students Face a Shrinking Big Tech Job Market

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    A new reality is setting in for students and recent graduates who spent years honing themselves for careers at the largest tech companies.Ever since she was a 10th grader in Seattle, Annalice Ni wanted to develop software for a prominent tech company like Google. So she went to great lengths to meet the internship and other résumé criteria that make students attractive hires to the biggest tech firms.In high school, Ms. Ni took computer science courses, interned at Microsoft and volunteered as a coding teacher for younger students. She majored in computer science at the University of Washington, earning coveted software engineering internships at Facebook. After graduating from college this year, she moved to Silicon Valley to start her dream job as a software engineer at Meta, Facebook’s parent company.Then last month, Meta laid off more than 11,000 employees — including Ms. Ni.“I did feel very frustrated and disappointed and maybe a bit scared because all of a sudden, I didn’t know what to do,” Ms. Ni, 22, said of her unexpected career setback. “There’s not much I could have done, especially in college, more than I already did, better than I already did.”Over the last decade, the prospect of six-figure starting salaries, perks like free food and the chance to work on apps used by billions led young people to stampede toward computer science — the study of computer programming and processes like algorithms — on college campuses across the United States. The number of undergraduates majoring in the subject more than tripled from 2011 to 2021, to nearly 136,000 students, according to the Computing Research Association, which tracks computing degrees at about 200 universities.Ms. Ni spends her days interviewing for jobs and brushing up on her skills.Jason Henry for The New York TimesTech giants like Facebook, Google and Microsoft encouraged the computing education boom, promoting software jobs to students as a route to lucrative careers and the power to change the world.But now, layoffs, hiring freezes and planned recruiting slowdowns at Meta, Twitter, Alphabet, Amazon, DoorDash, Lyft, Snap and Stripe are sending shock waves through a generation of computer and data science students who spent years honing themselves for careers at the largest tech companies. Tech executives have blamed a faltering global economy for the jobs slowdown.The cutbacks have not only sent recent graduates scrambling to find new jobs but also created uncertainty for college students seeking high-paying summer internships at large consumer tech companies.In the past, tech companies used their internship programs to recruit promising job candidates, extending offers to many students to return as full-time employees after graduation. But this year, those opportunities are shrinking.Amazon, for instance, hired about 18,000 interns this year, paying some computer science students nearly $30,000 for the summer, not including housing stipends. The company is now considering reducing the number of interns for 2023 by more than half, said a person with knowledge of the program who was not authorized to speak publicly.More on Big TechMicrosoft: The company’s $69 billion deal for Activision Blizzard, which rests on winning the approval by 16 governments, has become a test for whether tech giants can buy companies amid a backlash.Apple: Apple’s largest iPhone factory, in the city of Zhengzhou, China, is dealing with a shortage of workers. Now, that plant is getting help from an unlikely source: the Chinese government.Amazon: The company appears set to lay off approximately 10,000 people in corporate and technology jobs, in what would be the largest cuts in the company’s history.Meta: The parent of Facebook said it was laying off more than 11,000 people, or about 13 percent of its work forceBrad Glasser, an Amazon spokesman, said the company was committed to its internship program and the real-word experience that it provided. A Meta spokeswoman referred to a letter to employees from Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, announcing the company’s layoffs last month.Hiring plans are also changing at smaller tech firms. Roblox, the popular game platform, said it planned to hire 300 interns for next summer — almost twice as many as this year — and was expecting more than 50,000 applications for those spots. Redfin, which employed 38 interns this summer, said it had canceled the program for next year.There are still good jobs for computing students, and the field is growing. Between 2021 and 2031, employment for software developers and testers is expected to grow 25 percent, amounting to more than 411,000 new jobs, according to projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But many of those jobs are in areas like finance and the automotive industry.“Students are still getting multiple job offers,” said Brent Winkelman, chief of staff for the computer science department at the University of Texas at Austin. “They just may not come from Meta, from Twitter or from Amazon. They’re going to come from places like G.M., Toyota or Lockheed.”College career centers have become sounding boards for anxious students on the cusp of entering the tech job market. In career counselors’ offices, the search for a Plan B has heightened.Some students are applying to lesser-known tech companies. Others are seeking tech jobs outside the industry, with retailers like Walmart or with government agencies and nonprofits. Graduate school is also an option.“This particular class has been a lot more savvy than previous classes,” said Hazel Raja, senior director of the career development office at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif. “Even those who have secured job offers, they’re still making sure they’re networking and staying engaged in campus recruiting opportunities.”Helen Dong, 21, a senior majoring in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, interned at Meta twice, in 2021 and 2022. So she was surprised at the end of this summer, she said, when she did not receive a job offer from the company. Meta’s recent layoffs prompted her to apply for jobs outside tech, at automotive and financial companies. Last month, she posted videos on TikTok advising her peers to adjust their job expectations.Helen Dong, 21, a senior majoring in computing at Carnegie Mellon University, interned at Meta but did not receive a job offer. Now she is looking in the finance and automotive industries.Helen Dong“I chose to major in computer science so that I could get a ton of offers after college and make bank,” Ms. Dong joked in one TikTok, as she sang along to “Reduce Your Expectations to 0.” In this job market, she wrote at the bottom of the video, “be grateful with 1 offer.”In interviews, 10 college students and recent graduates said they were not prepared for a slowdown in jobs at the largest tech companies. Until recently, those companies were fiercely competing to hire computer science majors at top schools — with some students receiving multiple job offers with six-figure starting salaries and five-digit signing bonuses. An entire genre of TikTok videos had sprung up dedicated to young techies extolling their job perks and their annual compensation, with at least one highlighting a $198,000 package, complete with stock options and relocation expenses.Dozens of people who were recently laid off, or whose tech job offers were rescinded, have posted details of their plights on LinkedIn. To alert recruiters, some have added the hashtag #opentowork to their LinkedIn profile photos.Tony Shi, 23, who majored in computer science and business at Western University in London, Ontario, is one of them. After graduating this year, he began working as a product manager at Lyft in August. In November, the ride-hailing company laid off about 650 employees, including Mr. Shi.Now he is on a tight deadline to find a new job. Mr. Shi is Canadian, from Waterloo, Ontario, and obtained a visa to move to San Francisco for his job at Lyft. Under the visa, he has 60 days to find a new job. He said he had become more sensitive to the businesses and balance sheets of potential employers.“I need to be a little more risk-averse. I definitely don’t want to get laid off again,” he said. Instead of his taking a company for its word, he added, “now, the product needs to make a lot of sense.”Meta rescinded its job offer to Rachel Castellino, 22, weeks before she was scheduled to start work.Jason Henry for The New York TimesSome recent graduates did not get the chance to start their new tech jobs.Rachel Castellino, a statistics major at the California Polytechnic State University, worked to land a job at a major tech company. During college, she interned as a project manager at PayPal, received a data science fellowship funded by the National Science Foundation and founded a data science club at her school.Ms. Castellino, 22, knew she would have to grind to pass companies’ technical interviews, which typically involve solving programming problems. Last year, she spent much of the fall job hunting and preparing for coding assessments. For four days a week, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., she studied probability concepts and programming languages. Even so, she said, the interview process was brutal.In November 2021, Meta offered her a job as a data scientist, starting in December 2022. Last month, Meta rescinded the offer, she said.“I worked so hard for those interviews. It felt really good to earn something of a high caliber,” she said. “I had so much to look forward to.”The setback has been disheartening. “I was upset,” Ms. Castellino said. “It wasn’t good to hear.”As for Ms. Ni, she now views losing her dream job as an opportunity to broaden her career horizons. Over the last month, she has applied to midsize tech firms and start-ups that she finds innovative — potential employers she had not previously considered.“I’m exploring opportunities that I didn’t before,” Ms. Ni said. “I feel like I’ve already learned some things.”Karen Weise More

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    Are You Applying for Tech Jobs or Internships? We Want to Hear About It.

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    Layoffs and hiring freezes at companies like Amazon and Meta are changing the job market for recent grads and college students. Tell us about your experiences.November was a bleak month for tech workers. Meta, Amazon, Lyft, Stripe and Twitter laid off thousands of employees. Microsoft and Google announced hiring slowdowns.The cutbacks and hiring freezes affected not only veteran employees. Some tech companies laid off recent college graduates or rescinded their job offers. Some firms are also cutting their summer internship programs for college students next year.The industry slowdown is sending shock waves through a generation of computer science and data science students who spent years preparing themselves for careers at the largest tech companies. Many recent grads and college seniors are now seeking tech jobs outside the tech industry, in industries like retail, banking and finance.I’m a technology reporter at The New York Times who investigates the societal impacts of tech innovations and tech company business practices. And I am reporting a story about the implications of the industry jobs slowdown for people in the early stages of their tech careers.If you are a college student or recent grad applying for tech internships or jobs, I’d like to hear from you.We may use your contact information to follow up with you. If we publish your submission, we will not include your name without first contacting you and obtaining your permission.Tell us about your experiences applying for tech jobs and internships More

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    Tech’s Talent Wars Have Come Back to Bite It

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    Hiring the best, the brightest and the highest number of employees was a badge of honor at tech companies. Not anymore as layoffs surge.When Stripe, a payments start-up valued at $74 billion, laid off more than 1,000 employees this month, its co-founders blamed themselves. “We overhired for the world we’re in,” they wrote. “We were much too optimistic.”After Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, slashed the company’s staffing in half last week, Jack Dorsey, a founder and former chief executive of the social media service, claimed responsibility. “I grew the company size too quickly,” he wrote on Twitter.And on Wednesday, when Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, shed 11,000 people, or about 13 percent of its work force, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive, blamed overzealous expansion. “I made the decision to significantly increase our investments,” he wrote in a letter to employees. “Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected.”The chorus of conceding by tech executives that they hired too many people is ricocheting across Silicon Valley as the industry rushes to make cuts, blaming a worsening economy.But at least part of the surge in layoffs was self-inflicted. When the companies enjoyed soaring profits and a belief that the pandemic-fueled boom times would keep going, they aggressively expanded by hoarding the most fought-over and expensive resource in the software business: talent.Silicon Valley tech companies have long seen hiring as more than just filling openings. The industry’s fierce talent wars showed that companies like Google and Meta were gaining the best and brightest. Ballooning staffs and a long reign atop lists of the most-desired jobs for college graduates were emblems of growth, deep pockets and prestige. And to employees, the work became something larger — it was an identity.The Austin, Texas, campus of Google, a veteran of the tech industry’s hiring wars.Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York TimesThis mentality became ingrained at the largest tech companies, which offer numerous perks on lavish corporate campuses that rival universities. It was echoed by smaller start-ups, which dangle a chance at life-changing wealth in the form of stock options.Now these practices are giving the tech industry indigestion.“When times are flush, you get excesses, and excesses lead to overhiring and optimism,” said Josh Wolfe, an investor at Lux Capital. “For the past 10 years, the abundance of cash led to an abundance of hiring.”More than 100,000 tech workers have lost their jobs this year, according to Layoffs.fyi, a site that tracks layoffs. The cuts range from well-known publicly traded companies like Meta, Salesforce, Booking.com and Lyft to highly valued private start-ups such as the Gopuff delivery service and the Chime and Brex financial platforms.More on Big TechMeta Layoffs: The parent of Facebook said it was laying off more than 11,000 people, or about 13 percent of its work force, in what amounted to the company’s most significant job cuts.Seeking Alternatives: Since Elon Musk bought Twitter, some of its users have sought out other social media platforms. Here is a closer look at Mastodon, one of the most popular alternatives.An Empire in Danger: U.S. lawmakers’ objections to an obscure Chinese semiconductor company and tough Covid-19 restrictions are hurting Apple’s ability to make new iPhones in China.Big Tech’s Slowdown: Amid inflation and rising interest rates, Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies are signaling that tough days may be ahead. Some have already announced hiring freezes and job cuts.Many of the job losses have taken place in tech’s most experimental areas. Astra, a rocket company, cut 16 percent of its staff this week after tripling its head count last year. In the cryptocurrency industry, which has suffered a meltdown this year, high-value companies including Crypto.com, Blockchain.com, OpenSea and Dapper Labs have cut hundreds of workers in recent months.Tech leaders were too slow to react to signs of an economic slowdown that emerged this spring, after many of the companies had already been on hiring sprees for several years, tech analysts said.Meta, whose valuation soared past $1 trillion, doubled its staff to 87,314 people over the past three years. Robinhood, the stock trading app, expanded its work force nearly sixfold in 2020 and 2021.“They’ve charged ahead with these plans that are no longer based on reality,” said Caitlyn Metteer, director of recruiting at Lever, a provider of recruiting software.For many, it’s a moment of shock. “Are we in a bubble” panics in the tech industry over the last decade have always been short-lived, followed by a rapid return to even frothier good times. Even those who predicted that pandemic behaviors enabled by the likes of Zoom, Peloton, Netflix and Shopify would ebb now say they underestimated the extent.Many believe this downturn will last longer because of the macroeconomic factors that created it. For the past decade, low interest rates pushed investors into riskier assets that offered higher returns. Those investors valued fast growth over profits and rewarded companies that took big risks.Jack Dorsey wrote on Twitter, which he helped start, that he had expanded the company too quickly.Marco Bello/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn recent years, tech companies responded to the flood of cash from investors and a rapidly growing business by pouring money into expansion via sales and marketing, hiring, acquisitions and experimental projects. The excess capital encouraged companies to staff up, adding fuel to the war for talent.“The pressure is to just spend the money quick enough so you can grow fast enough to justify the kinds of investments V.C.s want to make,” said Eric Rachlin, an entrepreneur who co-founded Body Labs, an artificial intelligence software company that Amazon bought.Expanding head count was also a way for managers to advance their careers. “Getting more people on the team is easier than telling everyone to just work super hard,” Mr. Rachlin said.That led the tech industry to gain a reputation for corporate bloat. Rumors often circulated of highly compensated workers who clocked just a few hours of work a day or juggled multiple remote jobs at once, alongside elaborate office perks like free laundry, massages and renowned cafeteria chefs. This spring, Meta scaled back its perks, including laundry service.In the past, tech workers could quickly change jobs or land on their feet if they were cut because of the plethora of open positions, but “I don’t think we know yet if everyone in this wave of layoffs will be able to do that,” Mr. Rachlin said.Some people see a chance to help those entering a difficult job market for the first time. Stephen Courson recently left a career in sales and strategy at Gartner, the research and consulting firm, and Salesforce to create financial content. He initially planned to focus on time management, but after many of his friends went through painful layoffs he began working on a course that helps people prepare for job interviews. It’s a skill that many of today’s job hunters never had to hone in flush times.“This isn’t going to get better quickly,” he said.Amid the drumbeat of layoff announcements, investors see an opportunity. They are quick to point out that well-known successes of the last decade — companies like Airbnb, Uber, Dropbox — were created in the aftermath of the Great Recession.This week, Day One Ventures, a venture capital firm, announced Funded Not Fired, a program that aims to invest $100,000 into 20 new start-ups where at least one founder was laid off from a tech company. Within 24 hours, hundreds of people had applied, said Masha Bucher, founder of the firm.“Some of the people are saying, ‘This is a sign I’ve been waiting for,’” she said. “It really gives people hope.”In the meantime, there may be more layoff announcements — delivered through the now standard form of a letter from the chief executive posted to a company blog.These letters have taken on a familiar format. The bosses explain the grim economic outlook, citing inflation, “energy shocks,” interest rates, “one of the most challenging real estate markets in 40 years” or “probable recession.” They take the blame for growing too fast. They offer up support to those affected — severance, visa help, health care, career guidance. They express sadness and thank everyone.And they reaffirm the company’s mission. More

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    Meta Is Said to Plan Significant Job Cuts This Week

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    Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, said last month that many “teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year” as his company faces economic challenges.SAN FRANCISCO — Meta plans to lay off employees this week, three people with knowledge of the situation said, adding that the job cuts were set to be the most significant at the company since it was founded in 2004.It was unclear how many people would be cut and in which departments, said the people, who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The layoffs were expected by the end of the week. Meta had 87,314 employees at the end of September, up 28 percent from a year ago.Meta has been struggling financially for months and has been increasingly clamping down on costs. The Silicon Valley company, which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, has spent billions of dollars on the emerging technology of the metaverse, an immersive online world, just as the global economy has slowed and inflation has soared.At the same time, digital advertising — which forms the bulk of Meta’s revenue — has weakened as advertisers have pulled back, affecting many social media companies. Meta’s business has also been hurt by privacy changes that Apple enacted, which have hampered the ability of many apps to target mobile ads to users.Last month, Meta posted a 50 percent slide in quarterly profits and its second straight sales decline. The company said at the time that it would be “making significant changes across the board to operate more efficiently,” including by shrinking some teams and by hiring only in its areas of highest priority.More on Big TechMusk’s Twitter Takeover: Elon Musk has moved quickly to overhaul Twitter since he completed his $44 billion buyout of the company. But can he make the math work?Big Tech’s Slowdown: Amid stubborn inflation and rising interest rates, Google, Meta, Microsoft and other tech companies are signaling that tough days may be ahead. Some have already announced hiring freezes and job cuts.App Store Battle: Spotify wants to get into the audiobooks business, but Apple has rejected its new app three times. The standoff is the latest in a series of confrontations between the companies.Inside Meta’s Struggles: After a rocky year, employees at Meta are expressing skepticism, confusion and frustration over Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for the metaverse.Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, had added that most “teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year.” He said the company would “end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.”The Wall Street Journal earlier reported Meta’s plans for layoffs this week.Mr. Zuckerberg has been signaling tougher times ahead for months. In July, he told employees that the company was facing one of the “worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history” and that workers should prepare to do more work with fewer resources. Their performances would also be graded more intensely than previously, he said.“I think some of you might decide that this place isn’t for you, and that self-selection is OK with me,” Mr. Zuckerberg told employees in a call at the time. “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here.”Meta joins other tech companies that have been laying off employees as economic conditions have grown more challenging. Tech companies boomed during the coronavirus pandemic but many of the largest firms reported financial results in recent weeks that showed they were feeling the impact of global economic jitters.On Friday, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the new owner of Twitter, laid off half of the company’s staff. Last week, Lyft also said it would cut 13 percent of its employees, or about 650 of its 5,000 workers. Stripe, a payment processing platform, said it would cut 14 percent of its employees, roughly 1,100 jobs. Snap, Robinhood and Coinbase are among other companies that have announced job cuts this year.Other tech companies are freezing their hiring. Last week, Amazon said it had decided to pause incremental corporate hiring because the economy was “in an uncertain place.” The move added to a freeze from last month, when the e-commerce giant halted corporate and technology hiring in its retail business for the rest of the year. More