FTX's bankruptcy caps off a brutal period for the tech industry, which laid off more than 20,000 people in the last 2 weeks alone
- The tech industry is in a period of intense turbulence amid mass firings and FTX's downfall.
- More than 20,000 tech workers have been fired in just the last two weeks, according to calculations by Insider.
For at least the last decade, tech jobs have been highly sought after, with the industry gaining a reputation for competitive pay and cushy perks.
Now, much of the tech world is in a period of intense turbulence.
The most notable example is the implosion of one of the world's largest crypto trading firms, FTX. The company officially filed for bankruptcy on Friday, capping off a turbulent week that has embroiled the firm and its CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, in a slew of regulatory inquiries.
While FTX's future remains uncertain, hundreds of its employees could potentially lose their jobs.
But FTX's downfall is just the tip of the iceberg regarding the tech industry's problems.
Insider calculates that at least 20,000 tech workers were either fired or learned they were being fired in the last two weeks.
Some layoffs received public attention, like Meta's 11,000-person workforce reduction announcement on Wednesday or Elon Musk's 50% layoff bloodbath at Twitter last week.
However, other companies' layoffs in the last 14 days, like Lyft, Coinbase, Salesforce, and Stripe, received less attention from the general public. There were others, too: Booking.com, Stripe, ZenDesk, RingCentral, and Dapper Labs also have quietly laid off staff in November.
Tech workers, once in such great demand that companies had to continually offer higher pay and better benefits to attract them, are now finding themselves out of a job simultaneously.
Meta investor Brad Gerstner, who encouraged the social media giant to lay off workers in an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg last month, argued that there might be a silver lining in mass firings.
"We have a shortage of talent in Silicon Valley. Meta and other large companies have made it very difficult for start-ups to hire. We are confident that these employees will find replacement jobs and quickly be back to work on important inventions that will move us all forward," Gerstner wrote.
As the economic forecast continues to look grim and interest rates rise, it is possible that the odds just got longer for every laid-off tech worker "quickly" finding themselves in a new gig.