Big Tech isn’t hiring like it used to, unless you say the magic words

When Big Tech started slashing jobs in late 2022, it felt like a brief (and painful) correction to the pandemic-era hiring binge, when Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet collectively added more than 960,000 jobs during the peak of the digital demand boom.

Nearly three years later, however, the layoffs haven’t really stopped.

According to TechCrunch, more than 22,000 US tech workers have been let go just this year — including Intel slashing 20% of its workforce, Meta trimming Reality Labs, Amazon’s ~100 job cuts, Google’s back-to-back downsizing rounds, and just last week, Microsoft laying off 6,000 employees globally.

Looking across a selection of the largest public US technology firms, it’s easy to see that headcount growth has either slowed or outright reversed in the past two years for many.

Some notable exceptions? Netflix, which has been remarkably lean for more than a decade with just ~14,000 employees, and chip designers and semiconductor companies like Nvidia and Broadcom, which are powering much of the AI revolution.

In fact, that divergence has been playing out within America’s tech companies as well. If you’re close to the action in AI, your stock is probably rising internally. But if you’re in an operational role, administrative job, or even in a field of software engineering that’s more exposed to AI, you might not be feeling as secure.

Since February 2020, US job listings for software development roles have fallen nearly 40%, and IT help desk roles are down over 30%, according to data from hiring platform Indeed. That’s significantly worse than other sectors like finance or legal, and well below the broader job market, where listings are up 6%.

Postpandemic, much of the tech world’s obsession with getting lean — CEO Mark Zuckerberg called 2023 the “year of efficiency” for Meta — came from rising interest rates, margin pressure, and a reckoning with Covid-era overhiring. But now, something else is reshaping the tech job market, which some experts are calling “a very powerful ChatGPT effect.”

According to the University of Maryland’s January research, the number of IT job postings dropped 27% from the end of 2022 to 2024, while AI-related roles jumped 68%.

Researchers see this divergence as “clear evidence” of ChatGPT’s growing influence, as the chatbot’s late-2022 debut prompted companies to rethink how they build (and staff) their tech stacks — starting with the lowest-hanging tasks for machines to take over. That has only accelerated in the wake of rival chatbots like DeepSeek, Claude, Perplexity, and others.

Kanary in the coal mine?

Take Klarna, the Swedish “buy now, pay later” firm that’s been leaning hard on AI, so much so that a hyperrealistic AI-generated avatar of CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski presented the company’s quarterly earnings earlier this week. 

Beyond its actual results, what grabbed investors’ attention — or at least, what Klarna execs probably hoped would be the focus ahead of its long-awaited IPO — was a whopping 154% jump in its revenue per employee over the past two years, which reached an impressive $877,000.

Under a mixed agriculture/military metaphor titled, “Reaping the benefits of spearheading AI,” Klarna touted that it had reduced its workforce by roughly 40% in just two years.

The biggest cost savings in Q1 came from customer service, where Klarna replaced human agents with its in-house AI chatbot, cutting service costs by 40% since 2023.

That’s a sector that has long been cited as one of the most vulnerable to AI, with Klarna saying its chatbot now does the work of 700 people. Following complaints about its “lower quality,” however, Klarna recently said it will bring back real people — though it’s unclear how many bots (and humans) the company will ultimately retain.

Despite the slimmed-down workforce, Klarna’s net loss more than doubled in Q1, to some $99 million.

From phones to keyboards

But it’s not just about call centers anymore; AI is creeping into corporate jobs, too, the kind of work once considered out of reach for automation. As part of larger global layoffs, Microsoft recently cut ~2,000 jobs in its home state of Washington and software engineers bore the brunt of the pain, accounting for 40% of the cuts, per Bloomberg. CEO Satya Nadella revealed that AI now writes up to 30% of the company’s code on certain projects. Over at Google, Chief Scientist Jeff Dean said in March that AI could soon match the performance of junior engineers.

It raises the real question: is any of this shift showing up in actual hiring data?

To the relief of the 2.2 million software developers in the US, it seems they haven’t entirely been sidelined just yet — though AI is reshaping the rules of who gets in the door.

According to a new report from venture capital firm SignalFire, Big Tech’s hiring for software engineering roles still grew about 3% year over year last year, while there was a 27% surge in AI hires, and less technical functions like marketing and sales fell by double digits.

And while tech hiring hasn’t collapsed across the board, early-career workers are taking the hardest hit — when the overall labor market is already freezing out job seekers fresh out of college. Per SignalFire, new-grad hiring at Big Tech fell 25% last year and is now more than 50% below prepandemic levels. Meanwhile, mid- and senior-level hiring is surging — up 27% year over year for those with two to five years of experience, and 34% for those with five to 10 years — as companies opt for seasoned engineers who can hit the ground running, rather than training juniors when AI can handle the basics.