US tech travails | Mint

After Meta, it’s now Amazon that seems ready to shrink its workforce, with as many as 10,000 job cuts reportedly on the cards. That is a big move, but not an isolated one. Other American tech firms have also either announced or are contemplating such downsizing. Twitter, for example, fired 3,700 employees, or about half its workforce. Elon Musk, its new owner who called himself the platform’s ‘Chief Twit’, even took to public sackings, with at least one engineer fired by a tweet for questioning his facts. When firings happen in such indiscreet ways, there’s surely a deep problem for the global technology industry to ponder. The root cause of its pain was the huge pandemic-time bets these companies placed on leaps in business that did not materialize. Covid did reshape our work and personal lives in major ways, but expectations of complete virtual immersion were misplaced. Apologies for miscalculations have been issued by business leaders, but cynics cannot be brushed aside who wonder if these layoffs were seen as a palatable post-pandemic eventuality all along. The US is habituated to a hire-and-fire labour market. But it plays very poorly in a place like India.