Amidst the billions of dollars being invested in AI technology and the confidence that tech giants are heralding towards it, the lay off trend in #tech business continues in 2024.

This past March, dozens of companies laid off employees, struggling with challenging market conditions. While the losses that tech firms have suffered since the beginning of January have been many times less than previous years, curbing inflation and an improving economic picture are not enough to end the layoffs.

Below you’ll see a list of companies that laid off employees in March, some of which have permanently suspended operations, TechCrunch reports.

ChowNow

ChowNow has laid off 20% of its staff following the acquisition of sales platform Cuboh. This isn’t the first layoff for the company, which laid off 100 people in 2022.

Nintendo of America

The company everyone knows is restructuring its testing department, at the expense of the employees it’s made up of. A Nintendo spokesperson told Kotaku that the changes will put an end to some tasks, but will result in the creation of new full-time positions. However, whether the hopeful plans for employees will come to fruition remains to be seen.

Dell

Dell has reduced its global workforce by about 6,000 jobs, according to a 10-K filed with the SEC. The filing reveals that the company has cut 13,000 jobs over the past year.

Synctera

Synctera also makes the list of companies that have entered the lay off trend. A Fintech Business Weekly report said the layoffs affected 17 people, or about 15% of the company.

ShopBack

ShopBack has eliminated 195 positions in an effort to become more sustainable, CEO Henry Chan wrote in a blog post. The layoffs affect nearly a quarter of the company’s employees.

Airmeet

Airmeet has cut 20% of its total workforce in its second restructuring in the past year.

Chipper Cash

CEO Ham Serunjogi announced in a blog post that he has made another round of cuts affecting 20 employees.

Textio

Texito has reportedly made 16% of its staff redundant in a strategic move to support its Textio Lift product.

Stash

The company has laid off about 25% of its employees. According to Axios, the layoffs affect about 80 people.

Phantom Auto

Phantom Auto has ceased operations after failed attempts to secure new funding, TechCrunch reports. The remote driving startup, which laid off employees last year, employed just over 100 people.

IBM

IBM also made the list of companies that laid off employees in March. This time, the company laid off its marketing and communications workforce. Earlier, IBM announced a strategy to replace up to 8,000 jobs with artificial intelligence.

Inscribe.ai

Inscribe.ai has laid off just under 40% of its staff, the company confirmed to TechCrunch.

Turnitin

Turnitin is another company that laid off around 15 people earlier this year, following comments from CEO Chris Karen that the company would be able to cut 20% of its staff again thanks to artificial intelligence.

Sorare

Sorare has laid off 13% of the people working in its New York office. According to claims from a source via TechCrunch, the reason for this is that fantasy sports platform Web3 is focusing on its Paris headquarters.

Project Ronin

Project Ronin has carried out a mass layoff that has affected around 150 employees. The reason for it is the winding down of the company.

The tech giant said it would lay off hundreds of employees in its voice assistant unit, and eliminate hundreds of positions from the hardware team responsible for Pixel, Nest and Fitbit. The augmented reality (AR) team is also affected, with the majority of people in it to be laid off.

The company has come out with the opinion that such extreme actions are necessary and are part of the organizational changes.

“To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, and to align their resources to their biggest product priorities. Some teams are continuing to make these kinds of organizational changes, which include some role eliminations globally,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement.

Alphabet’s employee union said in an X that the layoffs were “unnecessary” and that the company could not “continue to fire colleagues” while making billions.

Google has recently downsized its AR hardware team and opted for collaboration with other original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), according to an initial report from 9to5Google. Additionally, there is a shift towards consolidating Google’s hardware engineering efforts into a unified core team, streamlining operations previously spread across Pixel, Fitbit, and Nest.

Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman are confirmed to be departing, as acknowledged by Google to TechCrunch. Notably, James Park played a crucial role in the introduction of the new Pixel Watch series of smartwatches within Google’s hardware portfolio.

In 2019, Google announced the acquisition of Fitbit for $2.1 billion, a process that underwent a two-year regulatory approval before finalizing in 2021. Since then, Google has integrated Fitbit products into its own offerings, exemplified by prompting Fitbit users to transition to Google accounts last year.

Simultaneously, the company made changes in its workforce, including personnel from the Google Assistant team, as reported by Semafor.

This latest company-wide layoff follows a larger workforce reduction of approximately 12,000 roles, or 6% of its employees, in January 2023.

The Alexa division will undergo a restructuring that will result in job cuts. The move is part of Amazon’s strategy to streamline operations and focus on key growth areas. Although no specific details on the number of cuts have been revealed, it is understood that they will affect a significant portion of the workforce.

In addition to this, the cloud gaming division will also make cuts. That division, focused on cloud gaming services, has faced challenges competing with industry giants like Google and Microsoft. The layoffs indicate a reassessment of Amazon’s approach to the cloud gaming market and a reallocation of resources to other initiatives.

These developments are further evidence of Amazon adapting to changing market dynamics and prioritizing areas with the greatest growth potential. With its latest actions, the company aims to better position itself in the highly competitive technology industry.

While layoffs can be troubling for employees, they can also have their upside. The layoffs signal the company’s efforts to optimize its resources and align its workforce with its strategic goals.

Amazon is expected to make further adjustments to its organizational structure and initiatives.

For the second quarter of 2023, the company reported quarterly revenue of $94.8 billion, down 3% year-over-year. During the company’s second-quarter earnings discussion with CNBC, CEO Tim Cook said it was possible to streamline Apple’s workforce.

“I view that as a last resort and, so, mass layoffs is not something that we’re talking about at this moment”, said Tim Cook.

The CEO seems to have stayed true to his words.

Apple’s job growth is in stark contrast to other tech companies, including Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon.

Apple’s next quarter results are due on August 3 and follow a historic high when the company became the first publicly traded company to end the trading day with a market value of $3 trillion in June 2023.

The layoffs were announced by Sahar Elhabashi, Spotify’s vice president, in a memo to employees, saying those affected would be provided “generous benefits.”

Elhabashi also said the “fundamental pivot from a more uniform proposition will allow us to support the creator community better.”

Since 2020, the company has spent 493 million euros ($526 million) on four different podcast acquisitions, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

In addition, Spotify has entered into sponsorship deals with celebrities such as Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, and Joe Rogan.

The FBAR filters will be designed and built at several manufacturing centers in the U.S., including Fort Collins, Colorado, where Apple said it already supports more than 1,100 jobs.

“We’re thrilled to make commitments that harness the ingenuity, creativity, and innovative spirit of American manufacturing. All of Apple’s products depend on technology engineered and built here in the United States, and we’ll continue to deepen our investments in the U.S. economy because we have an unshakable belief in America’s future.”

commented Apple CEO Tim Cook.

This is not the first agreement between Apple and Broadcom. The first deal between the tech companies was providing chips for several Apple devices, such as the AirPort and iPhone 5S. The new collaboration will enable Broadcom to continue investing in critical automation and workforce upskilling projects.

In 2021, Apple pledged to invest $430 billion in the U.S. economy over five years, and today it’s about to deliver with its latest deal.

“Torc aims to empower developers with data and intelligence, protect IP, increase upskilling and career opportunities, and make the remote workforce indispensable. Understanding performance data is the best way to do that”,

said Michael P. Morris, CEO and Co-founder of Torc.

Torc has expanded Codealike’s data and reporting capabilities as part of the reboot. Members of the Torc community can visualize programming results at no cost, create compelling quantitative assets for self marketers to increase their revenue and advance and develop their careers.

Technical debt (short term technical decisions that distract developers from coding new features) costs companies tens of billions of dollars per year. Analysts at McKinsey found “tech debt” to take up 15% – 60% of a company’s entire IT budget.

According to Gartner, companies that find ways to reduce tech debt will lower service delivery times by at least 50%. With Codealike, Torc is uniquely positioned to help companies minimize tech debt, while giving developers control of their coding and performance.

Personalized coding performance data is organized in a visual way that makes it easy to understand developer strengths and improvement opportunities. Developers decide when and what Codealike statistics to share for gamified recognition, peer ranking, team interaction and virtual collaboration.

“Torc takes privacy seriously and is committed to protecting developer data; Torc Community Members decide whether or not to share information generated from using Codealike. Integrity values like this are what differentiate Torc from others in the talent network space, and we’ll continue investing in the advancement of the software community’s skills and careers”,

said David Messinger, CTO and Co-founder of Torc.

“Torc is already an amazing nearshore talent network that cares about my career, but the addition of Codealike really makes it stand out from the crowd. Access to my coding data is so important and sharing it gives even more opportunity to expand my skills and earning potential.”

said Paulo Vitor Magacho, a Torc Community Member from Brazil who uses Codealike.

New Codealike features developed by Torc bring a human-centered approach to developer productivity and maximize career and earning potential. For a limited time, developers can access Codealike’s Premium features for free by creating a Torc Community Member account and completing at least 80% of their Torc profile.

Helix Core is a universal repository, review and versioning system that allows teams to accelerate large-scale collaboration. Helix Core is free for teams of up to five people, and ESP automates the configuration and deployment of Helix Core for new users on AWS.

As part of the AWS Marketplace listing, Perforce ESP was required to go through an AWS Foundational Technical Review (FTR) where it was evaluated against a specific set of cloud architecture best practices that are critical to customer success.

“Even small teams often have enterprise needs when it comes to managing digital assets and other large files. We are committed to meeting our customers on their cloud journey and helping them find solutions to their challenges with scale while supporting a global or remote workforce”,

said Steve Jezierski, GM of Digital Creation at Perforce.

The ESP allows new Helix Core users to get up and running quickly on AWS and easily scale without delays. The combined solution of ESP in AWS Marketplace can help remote teams with equal performance and access to do their work. Helix Core is known as the industry standard for game tech and trusted by some of the largest semiconductor and automotive companies for its scale and high-performance.

The company, which is better known by its former name Google Self-Driving Car Project, has suffered a second round of layoffs, this time bringing the total number of staff laid off to 209 people, or 8%.

Investors and industry observers are troubled by the billions of dollars that have been poured into the self-driving technology sector in a short period of time to commercialize it.

However, this is not the only company that has taken such measures.

In January, Alphabet said it would cut 12,000 jobs, affecting a large number of employees who support experimental projects.

In addition, Verily Life Sciences also laid off more than 200 employees, or about 15% of its workforce.

The trend of layoffs continues to grow, including Rivian Automotive, General Motors, Meta Platforms and other U.S. companies reaching for these measures in an attempt to cut costs amid the looming recession.

After the trial, most of the company’s employees said it would take a significant pay increase to return to the five-day workweek.

Around 75% of employees apparently said they would like to be incentivised with a 30% pay rise to restore normal working patterns. Surprisingly, the data shows a 16% increase in absenteeism despite generous shift scheduling, although stress levels have dropped 4% due to the reduced work week.

“The first set of results aligns with our initial positive expectations when we invested in this pioneering model.”

said Jose Salgado, Bizay co-founder and chief growth officer.

Proponents could pick figures to support their argument; talent recruitment was substantially boosted with 300% more applications to Bizay’s job openings than had been the case. More staff also stayed with the company, with 36% fewer employees departing year/year.

Around 98% of the workforce elected to take advantage of the four-day system. Since the programme started in October 2022, around 87% say they’ve taken “full usage” of the extra day off.

According to the company’s founder, the study showed no negative impact on productivity levels or quality of work. He identifies the four-day workweek as attractive to both current Bizai employees and potential candidates. He says it’s a new approach to work-life balance and creating a workplace that is progressive and meets employees’ needs.