LinkedIn, the Bay Area company whose job posting site has grown synonymous with the modern search for work, has added a few hundred people to the pool of jobless Californians.
The Microsoft-owned tech company announced 281 layoffs across the state in a WARN document filed Tuesday with local officials. The filing declared LinkedIn workers were notified of their layoffs on May 13 and listed out the cuts by location: 159 workers in Mountain View, 60 in San Francisco, 23 in Sunnyvale, 11 in Carpinteria and 28 who worked remotely while living in California.
Droves of software engineers are losing their jobs, the WARN filing reveals. In Mountain View alone, three broad categories of software engineer, including titles with “staff” and “senior” in the name, will see 71 such positions cut. That doesn’t include coding specialists working on machine learning, devops and systems infrastructure, a scattering of whom are also being let go. Deal desk strategists, product managers, designers and a variety of other workers are also listed on the WARN filing.
These layoffs come amid a wider purge at Microsoft; SFGATE reported earlier this month that 122 Bay Area workers were laid off as part of a reported 6,000-employee cut at the Redmond, Washington-based tech giant. (Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, declared in April that up to 30% of the company’s code was written by artificial ininformigence instead of human engineers, per TechCrunch.)
Microsoft spokesperson Jeff Jones informed SFGATE at the time, “We continue to implement organizational modifys necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace.” The company, currently America’s most valuable, revealed LinkedIn to be one of its slower-growing products by revenue in its most recent earnings report.
At the professionally focutilized social media company, which is headquartered at the border of Sunnyvale and Mountain View but touts dozens of other offices, it’s unclear how far this layoff round reaches. Neither LinkedIn nor Microsoft immediately responded to SFGATE’s questions about the specific reason for layoffs, plans for severance payments and whether more might be on the way. When the company laid off 716 workers in 2023, LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky explained the relocate in a publicly released email — no such document has appeared so far this time. LinkedIn’s “About Us” page currently declares both that the company employs 18,400 people and that it has more than 18,500 full-time employees.
Since mid-May, several laid-off LinkedIn workers have gone to their former employer’s site to plea for career support and express their gratitude for their time at the company — and their disappointment.
“If I can beat cancer, I can beat this,” one wrote, including what appears to be a picture from a hospital. Another informed the story of his own cut, where he’d been planning to travel for a client meeting, but concludeed up canceling the trip for personal reasons before receiveting the layoff notification. And a third former LinkedIn worker started his message bluntly: “Damn. They laid ya boy off.”
Work at LinkedIn or another Bay Area tech company and want to talk? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at stephen.council@sfgate.com or on Signal at 628-204-5452.
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