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1. Amazon:
   1. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos toldCNN he plans to give away most of his $124 billion fortune to charity during his lifetime.
   2. Amazon confirmed on Wednesday that layoffs had begun at the company, two days after multiple outlets reportedthe e-commerce giant planned to cut around 10,000 employees this week. The initial cuts at Amazon will impact roles on the devices and services team, per a memo shared publicly by Dave Limp, senior vice president of devices & services at Amazon
2.  Meta:
   1. Meta’s $10 billion loss on its AR/VR work came with a mountain of bad news overall. The company won the distinction of suffering the largest single-day wipeout in corporate history in the stock market, losing $220 billion in value.
   2. Meta is laying off 13% of its staff, or more than 11,000 employees, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees Wednesday.
3. Twitter:
   1. After an almost seven-month-long saga of various business and legal conflicts at Twitter, finally, on October 27, 2022, Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter at $44 billion and appointed himself as the new CEO of the company. Following the takeover by Elon Musk, the fired employees – Parag Agarwal, Ned Segal, Sean Edgett, Sarah Personette and Vijaya Gadda are covered by the ‘golden parachute clause’ signed between Twitter and Musk’s X Holdings. As per reports, Agarwal will receive the highest payout, followed by Segal at USD $25.4 million, Gadde at USD $12.5 million and Personette at USD $11.2 million.
   2. Twitter employs around 7,500 people. Various reports are putting the percentage of employees fired at fifty, meaning that around 3,700 people could lose their jobs. Twitter had 300 employees in India out of which 250 stand a chance to lose their job
4. TataOwned Jaguar Landrover is out to rescue laid-off tech industry workers in Britain as it looks to hire hundreds of laid-off engineers to help develop electric car technology. The 100-year-old luxury carmaker on Friday announced a jobs portal with 800 roles to help displaced tech workers. The company is looking to pick up workers laid off from companies to the likes of Amazon, Meta and Twitter, who are likely to have the required skills and will be given new roles in Britain, the United States, Ireland, China, India and Hungary.
5. Cognizant lays off 6 percent(Read 12k employees) in India of its total workforce over failed background checks
6. Accenture India recently revealed massive layoffs after discovering that the employees had faked their paperwork, similar to what happened at Cognizant before the issue became public. In a statement, the company assured its customers that “no impact” will be felt in terms of service.

The last few months haven been tumultuous in terms of how people (diligent or otherwise) could be on the receiving end of the corporate wrath except for the Tata JLR story. Alongwith these news clips we have also been reading about The Great Resignation, Great Retention, Moonlighting, Quite-quitting, Quiet firing and many more terms are possibly now being brewed…

A slightly deeper look at the top 3 news clippings gives us a clear dichotomy that exists between how leadership has viewed / perceived business outcomes, how they created those blue oceans for their line of business, conducted business, enhance the company net worth, added more and more wealth to their personal kitty but not quite being able to finally hold on to their projections thus leaving thousands in a state of deep stress, state-of-flux.

Obviously, a large part of these stories is not happening in isolation or by individuals – the companies in the top 3 news clippings are formally structured corporations and operate under various regulations, audit standards, compliance and regulations but none of these ever attempt to hold them responsible beyond the superficial support they provide to the retrenched employees. And we are talking of almost 50k future ready workforce.

One may reasonably speculate that this phenomenon has been triggered by daunting fiscal policies and the macroeconomic downturn post the COVID-19 pandemic and can also attribute to the economic impact of Covid but unfortunately all the corporations are on the digital space which we all know increased multi-fold in the last 2 years. This, accompanied by the surge in e-commerce and decreasing market cap, is why tech companies now feel the desperate need to effectively downsize their workforce, become capital efficient, explore new opportunities of growth, rebrand themselves and rationalize their business activities to survive in this highly competitive market.

Interestingly the rescue bell comes from a manufacturing corporation where the company’s Chief Information Officer stated their aim to “further strengthen their data and digital skills base so that they can deliver their Reimagine strategy and become an electric-first business from 2025 and achieve carbon net zero by 2039.”

What would obviously happen in the talent space for the next few months: Some talent would be picked up the likes of Tatas, some by the other big players while a large part of this Talent may find themselves in the start-up segment and some maybe picked up by traditional firms that wish to adopt an avant-garde data-driven culture by providing them with a much steadier employment.

What goes without saying is there would be pay-cuts(major or otherwise) as many of these talent would now try to fit themselves into what is available to them. Sustenance would be key here for the affected. On the flipside – in the run-up to attract good talent – the SME segment may end up increasing their spend. But hopefully they would learn to make more conservative projections and not continue to dwindle under the pressure, a few quarters down the line, in their own cocoons thus risking the employment for slightly larger group within their circle – basically creating smaller ripples after the bigger waves by the behemoths.

What continues to be a point of discussion – All the major layoffs indicated these were “initial” numbers and that is not a comforting news for the industry which alongwith the “possible recession” stories makes it even more worrying.

Where’s the silver lining: Opportunity surely lies as the influx of engineering and digital tech talent into the market that layoffs have generated can also be utilized by traditional firms that wish to adopt an avant-garde data-driven culture by providing them with a much steadier and lucrative employment. A well-established traditional set up can capitalize upon this opportunity to conduct their Research & Development projects, improve their customer experience, automize customer service, software development, IT operations, supply-chain management, human resource planning, systematically upgrade their products and platforms, and better manage cyber security issues.

As a result of such digital transformation, they shall be perfectly equipped to cope with the vagaries of the market, be able to shift to remote/hybrid working, cut down real estate costs, streamline e-commerce operations, employ technological expertise and agile systems to understand consumer behavior, in terms of product preferences and spending, and recommend/customize products accordingly.

Badgefree stays focused in the journey of assisted, amplified reach through several agencies & employers translating into multiple options for the Talent Providers(candidates) and Improve recruiter productivity (for the Talent Seekers – companies) thereby saving on sourcing time by making available curated profiles.