“This is a gift,” Mr. Pulliam said. “I don’t think that story is being told. It is always doom and gloom.”
But for tech workers going through their first economic downturn, the cuts were an eye-opener. Ms. Chang studied product design at university with a view to joining a tech industry that seemed recession-proof. Getting fired from Lyft shook that belief.
Erin Sumner, a software recruiter at Facebook’s parent company, Meta, used to boast to potential hires that the company had been the fastest ever to be valued at $1 trillion. She said she would promote the company’s strengths even last year when the stock price plummeted and its core business, digital advertising, struggled.
When layoff rumors began circulating last year, she assured colleagues that their jobs were safe, pointing to the company’s more than $40 billion in cash in the bank. But in November, she was one of 11,000 workers laid off.
“It was heartbreaking,” Ms Sumner, 32, said. She has found a new job as the lead recruiter for DeleteMe, a start-up that aims to remove a client’s information from search results. But she said she cringed every time she read about more tech layoffs.
“I’m afraid it’s going to get worse before it gets better,” Ms. Sumner said. “There is no guarantee. I was fired from the safest company in the world.”
A similar reversal of fortune has challenged companies that sell software services. Shares of Salesforce, a market leader, fell nearly 50 percent last year as revenue growth slowed. The company had spent money during the pandemic, spending $28 billion to buy Slack Technologies. It grew from 49,000 to 80,000 employees in two years.
At a general meeting last week to discuss the company’s decision to lay off 10 percent of its employees, Marc Benioff, the CEO, tried to sympathize with his disgruntled staff by putting the cuts in context.
