What is the point of a ranking of how happy the various countries of the world are? I ask myself this question on March 20, the tenth World Day of Happiness established by the United Nations.
Do you know that feeling you get when you return to a familiar place, etched in memory in minute detail, a source of pleasant certainty over the years thanks to its distinctive features? And the deep disorientation caused by discovering that this place has profoundly changed, shattering the almost mythical image that belonged to us for years? Well, that place, today, is Silicon Valley.
Mass layoffs by Big Tech
In short, because that’s what it is, California’s Big Tech companies are laying off workers at breakneck speed. Overnight, tens of thousands of people lost their jobs at Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter. Some Google employees, for instance, found out they were laid off by a beep and a red light instead of green — the one triggered by the badge they scanned each morning at the building entrance. A treatment totally at odds with the reputation, until now well-earned, that Google had built over the years: that of a company where valuable people could work for life, climbing the hierarchy and moving from project to project.
In the San Francisco Bay Area alone, more than 80,000 people have been laid off from digital companies in recent months, and more will be in the coming weeks. What is happening to Silicon Valley?
Welcome to the year of efficiency
Perhaps the most accurate summary comes from Facebook’s parent company, Meta, which described 2023 as “the year of efficiency,” the one in which removing multiple layers of middle management leads to faster decision-making processes and a restructuring of teams focused on effectiveness and profitability. The market’s response to this decision was, unsurprisingly, a 23% surge in the stock and the Nasdaq soaring.
And speaking of parent companies: Google’s parent, Alphabet, is clearly on the same wavelength. Alphabet and Google’s super CEO, Sundar Pichai, speaks of an “important journey to sustainably and durably redefine our cost structure.” But didn’t the pandemic generate record profits?
Yes, the pandemic was a godsend for tech giants, who hired excessively just to keep up with the level of market demand. Today that surplus, along with significant portions of staff that had been with the company long before the pandemic boom, has been brutally cut, like a harmful branch to the tree’s health.
The grown-ups are back
Meanwhile, Google — which in a single quarter managed to earn 17 billion in profits — still laid off thousands of people for the first time in its history, while Pichai received a $200 million bonus in stock.
Some details carry symbolic value. In the Silicon Valley we knew, stock options were one of the key perks offered to attract talent on board, to jointly pave the road to the digital future of modern companies. The Valley’s mythology was entirely built on the spectacular treatment reserved for workers: dreamlike stocks and salaries, sushi lunches, on-site massages, and various other perks that made us look at the Valley as a place apart, operating by its own rules created through a process of identity building, where merit and talent were recognized and valued like never before in the history of work.
Back then there were no “parents,” Alphabet and Meta, looming over the lives — and especially the future visions — of Google and Facebook. Apparently, after a unique and clearly unrepeatable season, the grown-ups are back. And these colossal, iconic Big Techs have finally revealed what they are — or have inevitably become — namely, money machines that show no mercy in pursuing their one true core business: profit.
The return of authority and the end of an era
With the mask fallen, the dream of Silicon Valley has collapsed. Those companies are no longer special. They follow the rules of the game — or try to influence them to their advantage — just like everyone else. They sacrifice long-standing career paths and professional relationships on the altar of efficiency. And they now perfectly embody the trend of bossism — the return of hierarchy and authority as the keystone of work systems.
The most observant will have certainly noticed this long ago. Big Tech has shifted focus from building a contemporary mythology to ruling the digital Olympus with an iron fist. And in doing so, they’ve humanized themselves, embracing all mortal vices — above all, greed.
An era is ending, we can admit it without hypocrisy. The ultra-rewarded nerd who puts his talent at the service of world-changing epics is now just another person, one of us, expendable by that Valley which — amidst pandemics, geopolitical, energy and climate crises — cares only for its self-preservation… pardon, its growth rate.
No, the digital giants are not in crisis. And they will do whatever it takes never to be.
