Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskThe first sign of trouble came on April 28th. In a quarterly earnings call Brian Olsavsky, Amazon’s chief financial officer, said that the e-commerce titan’s warehouses were overstaffed, costing about $2bn in the past year. A memo leaked a week later from Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said the firm was putting a freeze on new hires in most teams.
Much of the jobs growth came from startups and newly listed companies. But the tech giants, too, were adding plenty of employees. Between 2020 and 2021 Amazon, Meta and Netflix all increased their full-time staff by over a fifth. The ranks at Microsoft and Alphabet swelled by 11% and 16%, respectively.