These 6 charts show how layoffs at Google, Meta, and other tech giants still leave them with more employees than before the pandemic

• Big tech companies have laid off tens of thousands of employees in recent months.
• The cuts seem dramatic, as tech workers see their livelihoods disrupted during an economic downturn.

Big tech companies have laid off thousands of employees over the last few months, as a slowdown in tech spending forces them to rethink their priorities and costs.

It's quite a reversal from the narrative of the last two years, which saw tech companies growing at a rapid rate, and adding new employees just as quickly to rise to the moment.

And so, some critics see the sweeping layoffs as a sign that the tech giants have fallen from grace as their pandemic-driven growth spurt comes to a close.

However, the numbers tell a different story: While the layoffs definitely came with a heavy human cost, disrupting the lives and careers of tech workers, in the grand scheme, the cuts still returned the major tech companies to a larger headcount than they had pre-pandemic.

In other words, despite trends like the Great Resignation and more recently these mass layoffs, the tech giants have generally grown their headcounts vastly over the last several years. Even though they've endured big cuts recently, big tech firms still have headcounts that are well above their pre-pandemic levels, reflecting a trend that started well before the pandemic turbocharged their hiring.

These six charts show exactly how the job cuts impacted the trends in hiring at Amazon, Meta, Salesforce, Microsoft, and Alphabet.