Laid-off tech worker Joseph Tinner has spent almost a year hunting for a job. It has been a depressing crash course on the sea change in Silicon Valley.
The former product instructor from the San Francisco Bay Area has ridden the tech wave throughout his career, easily jumping from Verizon to Fitbit to Workday. Since losing his job early last year, the 59-year-old has hit a wall.
He applied for hundreds of roles — sometimes going through multiple rounds of consideration — only to get rejected again and again.
“It’s been a roller coaster,” he said. “It just takes a lot of resilience, honestly, to be in this job market.”
He isn’t alone.
Tech companies that aggressively hired during the COVID-19 pandemic have been slashing tens of thousands of jobs. For workers like Tinner, it has been a rough realization that the Silicon Valley shakeout is stretching into another year.
Just last week, Block — the financial tech company that owns payment services Square, Cash App and Afterpay — said it is laying off 4,000 people or half of its workforce.
Many other tech companies outside the hot artificial intelligence sector are slashing staff. Block blamed AI, saying the powerful technology means it no longer needs as many people.
“The intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company,” Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Block and a founder of Twitter, said in a post on X.
U.S.-based tech employers announced more than 33,000 job cuts from January to February, up 51% compared with the same period last year, the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said Thursday.
Andy Challenger, workplace expert and chief revenue officer for the firm, said he used to be skeptical that companies could replace workers with AI, but he’s starting to become convinced.
“Artificial intelligence has overtaken the attention of these companies in such a dramatic way,” he said.
Mass layoffs in the tech industry started in 2022, after a hiring surge during the pandemic, when demand for online services increased as people were stuck at home.
But many of the world’s most powerful tech companies have continued cutting, even as their profits have grown. They’ve cited various reasons for layoffs, from strategic shifts and restructuring to pivoting to smaller teams and fewer managers.
Tech companies such as EBay, Meta, Google, Autodesk, Pinterest, Salesforce and others have been shrinking their workforces. Layoffs have also hit the media and entertainment companies, including Los Angeles video game developer Riot Games.
On LinkedIn, laid-off workers who have been out of work — some for more than two years — have been asking for help finding a job. They’ve been sharing stories about their financial and emotional struggles, including losing their confidence, homes and savings as they search for work.
Tech workers who have seen their employers grow over the last decade have noticed a shift in corporate culture. Workers who have been laid off before said it has been tougher and taken longer to land a new job than previous years.
A longtime Salesforce employee, who was recently laid off and asked to remain anonymous, concerned that speaking to the media could affect their severance, said the sales software company used to be more focused on helping its employees. Salesforce broadcast this value by highlighting its “ohana,” culture, using the Hawaiian word for family.
“I was just incredibly grateful every day to be able to wake up and make a positive change in the world,” the worker said. “I thought that the company was devoted to the same thing.”
But the tone at Salesforce shifted in 2023 as the company faced pressure to cut costs and increase profits. New leaders came in, and the focus changed.
“The company is trying to erase any semblance of the way that it used to be,” the worker said.
Salesforce has said AI is helping it squeeze more profit from fewer people.
“AI is doing 30% to 50% of the work at Salesforce now,” the company’s co-founder and Chief Executive Marc Benioff told Bloomberg.
Salesforce didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Although technology is changing the way people work, experts and even some AI executives think companies sometime use AI as an excuse to cut workers in what’s referred to as “AI washing.”
Enrico Moretti, a professor of economics at UC Berkeley, said other factors besides AI are fueling layoffs. As a company grows larger and matures, it doesn’t hire as much as before.
“It’s a shift in their position and the maturing of their product, and therefore the technologies and their employment needs,” he said.
Roger Lee, an entrepreneur who created a website to track layoffs, Layoffs.fyi, in 2020, said in an email that tech companies are pouring billions of dollars into AI investments, and cutting headcount helps offset those costs.
When he started tracking layoffs six years ago, Lee wanted to create awareness around tech layoffs and help laid-off workers find their next job. He never anticipated the layoffs would continue today.
“I do think 6 years of persistent layoffs have led many tech workers to re-evaluate the perceived ‘safety’ of tech jobs and their relationship with the industry overall,” he said in an email.
According to Layoffs.fyi’s latest count, there have been more than 35,000 layoffs in the tech sector worldwide so far this year.
Close to half of that total is from Amazon alone.
Unemployed tech worker Tinner was laid off from Workday, a Pleasanton company that provides a platform to businesses, universities and organizations to manage payroll, benefits, finances and other tasks.
In 2025, Workday slashed roughly 1,750 jobs, or 8.5% of its global workforce, citing a prioritization of investments in artificial intelligence and platform development. Then in February, the company said it plans to cut 2% of its workforce or roughly 400 employees.
As job cuts pile up, Tinner is up against intense competition in a job market flooded with talent from the top companies in tech.
As he ponders his next career steps, he’s also redefining his identity and relationship with work.
He’s even tried pouring beer for fun or thought about doing more artwork.
“Maybe what I need to do is just celebrate all I’ve done instead of getting back into this rat race, on this treadmill, and look for something totally different,” he said.
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