Hundreds of applications, no jobs and AI competition: California's brutal tech work landscape
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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.
Business The tech industry, once seen as a relatively stable place to grow a career, continues to be hit by job cuts in 2025.Tech companies including Meta, Block, Autodesk and others are among businesses that have slashed their workforce.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, t...