Why so many jobs lost, who is still hiring?

A growing barrage of tech industry layoffs means slim selections for job-seeking software engineers and other tech workers amid a fiercely competitive Bay Area job market who went from generous to brutal.

Tech job openings have plummeted across the region. In the San Jose metro area, including Santa Clara and Sunnyvale, software-related job listings have dropped 45% since just before the pandemic, and information technology postings have dropped 37%, according to data from job market company ZipRecruiter. In the metro area encompassing San Francisco, Oakland and Fremont, software job postings fell 53% and IT job postings fell 28%.

“It’s kind of overwhelming,” said Joy Serquiña, a software engineer from San Jose, who lost her job at a startup in November and searched, along with hordes of others, for a new position. “It’s a constant chore. Applying is a bit like a full-time job.

Serquiña knows she is competing for positions with engineers from Big Five companies like Google on their resumes and fears losing to them. Yet there are opportunities: Serquiña meets companies looking for more specific skills, so she takes online courses and learns new technologies to expand her employability.

Her job search highlights the challenges and strategies of job seekers in a shrinking industry after a decade of explosive growth. Just before the COVID pandemic hit, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, had 119,000 full-time employees. As public health orders and fears of the deadly virus drove people from the physical world to online living and shopping, the digital advertising giant’s workforce exploded – to 190,000 by the end of the year last. Then last month, the company laid off 12,000 workers, including 1,600 in the Bay Area.

Many other Bay Area companies, including Facebook parent Meta of Menlo Park, Santa Clara computer chip maker Intel, San Jose video conferencing company Zoom, and San Jose payment platform PayPal also hired heavily during the pandemic before cutting jobs in recent months. The carnage has just exceeded 20,000 newly or soon to be unemployed since mid-2022.

Job losses are due to converging factors affecting technology companies’ revenues, profits, funding and shareholders. Rising interest rates diverted cash from technology to higher yielding investments, and reduced corporate risk taking. Life and commerce have returned to pre-pandemic patterns. Digital advertising declined, a strong US dollar hurt exports, and inflation and recession concerns drove up costs and reduced consumer spending. Tech stock prices have crashed.

While hiring has slowed, it hasn’t stopped, and some early-stage industries, mid-sized businesses and startups continue to hire new workers, said Roland Luk, careers manager at the school. of Commerce from UC Berkeley.

It took Stephen Lynch four months to find a new role after he was made redundant from a communications role at financial services software company Stripe in November. “I’ve never been out of a job this long in my life,” said Lynch, 40, from San Francisco. “I started broadening my search: different industries, different types of roles, different ways of doing contracting or consulting work to just fill in,” he said. Last week, Lynch started working in a communications role at Chronosphere, an enterprise software startup.

And even large companies that have laid off employees en masse are looking for new ones. Meta has nearly 800 job openings, nearly half of them in the Bay Area and about 300 related to its virtual and augmented reality technologies. Google lists more than 1,000 openings, the vast majority in engineering and technology units, many of them in the Bay Area.

“They have changing strategies and they always have to align resources with their new strategies,” Luk said.

Despite all the hardships, the newly unemployed American tech worker takes an average of seven weeks to be rehired, two weeks less than employees in other industries, according to a ZipRecruiter survey.

Julia Pollak, ZipRecruiter’s chief economist, said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has boosted defense job opportunities as US companies supply weapons to Ukraine and its neighbors concerned about Russian aggression.

“If you’re laid off from Facebook or Google, you might consider going to Lockheed Martin,” Pollak said. The aerospace giant, which produces rocket systems widely used by Ukrainian forces, is looking to fill more than 200 technical positions based in Sunnyvale or with the option of a location in Sunnyvale. And some of the stigma attached to working in the arms business — an industry that fueled the rise of Silicon Valley decades ago — has been erased by Russia’s ruthless conduct, Steve said. Blank, professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University.

Among emerging tech companies, chat software — with San Francisco’s suddenly ubiquitous OpenAI’s ChatGPT at the forefront — is expected to propel a slew of startups. Venture capitalist Shawn Carolan sees applications for sophisticated chatbots that can provide comprehensive answers to questions and prompts from consumers, businesses and students. “We think there will be a whole host of companies coming forward,” said Carolan, partner at Menlo Ventures at Menlo Park.

Many startups that have secured funding, and especially if they gain customers, add employees, said Luk, of UC Berkeley. “You have to show investors what you’re spending that money on,” he said.

Pleasanton technical writer Brian Immel, laid off from his job as a documentation engineer at Meta in November, is looking to startups, and not just because many are hiring. “They tend to be more hectic, more chaotic,” said Immel, 51. “But it just gives you more opportunities to prove yourself and have more impact.”

Looking for work in today’s conditions has been exhausting, Immel said. He has applied for 94 positions since his layoff, while taking online courses in the artificial intelligence specialty of machine learning to increase his employability. He said he has reached the interview stage with 47 companies, but finds that employers cast a wide initial net and “somewhere between recruiter and hiring manager” most of his applications stall. He remains in the interview process at four companies.

“I actively steer clear of big business because I know they’re not done with the bloodshed,” Immel said.

Engineering director Nitesh Donti landed at biotech software startup Benchling this week, nearly three months after being fired from robo-vehicle company Nuro. Some companies announced layoffs as he sought employment with them, said Donti, 30, of San Francisco. “It was a very interesting time to apply because you don’t know what’s going on anywhere,” he said.

Laid-off workers are also finding opportunities outside of the tech industry, as businesses, schools, government agencies and other employers boost their digital presence on apps and websites, Pollak said.

Blank, a former entrepreneur who saw Silicon Valley rebound from the dot-com bust and financial crisis, sees renewed financial discipline and new technologies putting the region’s tech industry at a turning point.

“I think it’s the best time ever for the tech people, they don’t know it yet,” Blank said. “It never looks like this if you’ve lost your job and you’re looking at the rubble on the ground. But something else emerges. We have already seen this film. We come out stronger.”