Tech and biotech Bay Area job cuts: more than 7,600 in two months

A two-month spree of brutal job cuts among tech and biotech firms has chopped more than 7,600 positions in the Bay Area, a forbidding trend that’s coming to light in official state labor notices.

About 30 tech or biotech companies have revealed plans to eliminate at least 7,689 jobs in the nine-county region, according to this news organization’s review of filings with the state Employment Development Department.

The companies that have orchestrated these layoffs are, in many instances, household names among consumers of tech devices or digital apps and services.

Facebook app owner Meta Platforms, Twitter, Amazon, Lyft, Oracle, Roku, Seagate, PayPal and GoFundMe are among the high-profile companies that have eliminated jobs or have disclosed plans to jettison positions in the Bay Area, the WARN letters to the state department show.

Here are the companies that have reported plans, or completed layoffs, of at least 200 workers in the Bay Area during October and November, according to the state labor filings:

• Meta Platforms: 2,564 job cuts affecting workers in Menlo Park, Sunnyvale, Fremont, Burlingame and San Francisco.
• Twitter: 1,126 layoffs of employees in San Francisco and San Jose.
• Cepheid, a biotech firm: 1,003 worker terminations in Newark, Sunnyvale and Santa Clara.
• Nuro, a robotics and autonomous delivery vehicle company: 269 job cuts in Mountain View.
• Amazon, an e-commerce behemoth: 263 positions lost in Sunnyvale.
• Lyft, a ride-hailing giant: 227 jobs eliminated in San Francisco.
• Oracle, a software and cloud services leviathan: 200 terminations in Redwood City and Belmont.

The most recent round of layoffs included job terminations by these companies: Nuro, 269 jobs in Mountain View; Flex Ltd., an electronics manufacturer, 155 jobs in Milpitas; RingCentral, 50 jobs in San Francisco; and Illumina, a software firm, 24 jobs in San Mateo and Hayward.

Numerous other tech or biotech companies have undertaken job cuts in the Bay Area with smaller totals that were effective on or after Oct. 1 of this year. These others, along with the totals in the Bay Area, include Western Digital, 189; Chime, 152; Astreya, 144; Zymergen, 110; Synthego, 105; and Kittyhawk, 100.

Among the companies that have revealed plans to cut fewer than 100 positions in the Bay Area: WeDriveU, 97; Asana, 97; Thermo Fisher, 95; BioMarin Pharmaceutical, 94; Roku, 93; onsemi, 88; Seagate, 84; Coursera, 77; PayPal 59; Natera, 58; Intercom, 55; FormFactor, 52; Aerotek at Flex, 48; and GoFundMe, 11.

Even worse, ominous warnings of more job terminations in the tech sector have surfaced.

San Jose-based Cisco Systems is warning it has decided to eliminate 5% of its workforce, which could mean the loss of 4,100 jobs worldwide.

Slowing demand for personal computers and the chips that are their intelligent brains has prompted Santa Clara-based Intel to prepare the groundwork for staffing cutbacks.

Palo Alto-based Hewlett Packard, a legendary tech behemoth, revealed plans to eliminate 4,000 to 6,000 jobs worldwide.

Those layoffs would occur during HP’s 2023 fiscal year, which extends from Nov. 1, 2022 through sometime around Oct. 31, 2023. This means the layoffs could begin in short order or months from now. The impact on the HP Bay Area workforce wasn’t disclosed.

“HP Inc. announced a fiscal year 2023 Future Ready Transformation plan, driving significant structural cost savings through digital transformation, portfolio optimization and operational efficiency,” the company stated in a prepared release.