The tech job recession is over

• Tech companies laid off more than 300,000 employees in the first half of 2023.
• Bernstein tech analysts have been tracking monthly job cuts across the industry.

Tech analysts from Bernstein Research have been posting monthly updates on layoffs across the industry for about a year. This week, they officially retired the data series.

Their final update, from Monday, showed 4,937 tech job cuts so far in August, based on data from Trueup.io. If the month continues at the same rate, there should be about 11,000 layoffs. That's well below the first six months of this year when there were more than 300,000 job losses in tech, or about 51,000 each month.

"The Tech Job Recession is Over," the Bernstein analysts declared in a recent email to clients. "Tech layoffs have slowed to a trickle. When will the hirings start to reaccelerate?"

Thank OpenAI and the generative AI boom for limiting the carnage here. AI startups have raised billions of dollars this year and when they're not frantically buying GPUs from Nvidia, they are spending some of their cash on hiring engineers and other AI specialists.

OpenAI's careers website listed 60 open roles on Tuesday afternoon, for instance.

Most big tech companies have also halted layoffs and some have even begun to rehire staff they let go only a few months ago.

Meta shed 25% of its workforce in multiple rounds of cuts that ended in May. Now, dozens of those workers have been rehired, mostly since June, Insider reported recently.

Amazon laid off 25,000 employees in January. By February, AWS HR VP Ian Wilson was telling staff that the company was looking for ways to rehire some of the laid off workers.