Job losses hammer Bay Area tech industry in brutal beginning for 2025

George Avalos, The Mercury News on Apr 2, 2025

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The Bay Area’s tech industry stumbled at the start of 2025 with a net loss of thousands of jobs over the first two months of this year, a slump that suggests the crucial sector’s hiring woes have yet to run their course.

During the first two months of 2025, tech companies slashed a net total of 8,700 jobs in the Bay Area, according to a Beacon Economics estimate that it derived from state labor agency estimates.

The tech sector’s job losses appear to be driving a slump in the Bay Area’s overall employment picture, which has darkened at the outset of 2025.

“The substantial loss of technology jobs in the Bay Area so far this year is a huge shock to the Bay Area economy and labor market,” said Scott Anderson, chief economist with BMO Capital Markets.

Bay Area employers chopped 6,900 tech jobs in January and another 1,800 in February, the Beacon Economics numbers show.

“The technology job loss trend has been in place for some time now, but the deterioration in the first two months of the year is concerning,” Anderson said.

The job setbacks for the tech industry show that this once-powerful engine of the Bay Area economy has sputtered and become a drag on a regional employment sector whose hiring used to hum at a robust pace.

“In the Bay Area, the technology sector does more than set the tone for the economy,” Anderson said.

Here’s how the region’s major tech hubs fared over the first two months of 2025, as disclosed by this news organization’s compilation of the Beacon estimates. All of the numbers were adjusted for seasonal volatility.

The numbers represent net losses for January and February of this year, since tech companies engaged in some hiring at the same time they shed jobs during those two months:

—The South Bay lost 4,100 tech jobs

—The San Francisco-San Mateo region shed 3,700 tech positions.

—The East Bay lost 700 tech jobs.

—In the North Bay, Sonoma County lost 400 tech jobs, Marin County shed 100, while Solano County gained 200 tech jobs. The number of tech jobs in Napa County was unchanged.

The uncertainty over the outcome of an array of federal government policies may have unsettled the tech industry’s typical approach to swing for the proverbial baseball fences.

“Our tech companies were already on an efficiency push, but the general tumult out there is turning previously swashbuckling companies into risk-averse shadows of themselves,” said Russell Hancock. “But the profitability is still there.”

Over the same two months, the Bay Area endured a loss of 9,900 jobs.

Put another way, the tech industry’s net job losses in the Bay Area accounted for 88% of all the net job losses in the nine-county region so far this year.

This dynamic strongly indicates that the employment setbacks in the tech industry have begun to weigh down the overall performance of the Bay Area job market.

One major concern: The tech sector’s job losses could begin to infect other industries in the region.

“It is unlikely other Bay Area service and retail businesses will be immune from the fallout from these lost tech jobs,” Anderson said.

In February, the Bay Area had roughly 836,400 tech jobs, according to the Beacon estimates. The Bay Area had approximately 4.01 million non-farm payroll jobs.

This means the tech industry accounted for 20.9% of the Bay Area’s payroll jobs, roughly one of every five.

“Given the Bay Area’s historic reliance on tech jobs for its overall employment growth, the region will need the tech economy to stabilize if it is going to reverse the recent trend of overall job losses,” said Jeff Bellisario, executive director of the Bay Area Council Economic Forum.

Tech companies appear to be attempting to find ways to continue to trim their staffs, even after the wide-ranging layoffs that roiled the industry in 2022, 2023 and 2024, experts warned.

‘While we seem to have moved beyond massive layoffs from the region’s tech titans, it is clear that the process of right-sizing is still ongoing in many tech companies,” Bellisario said.

During 2022, 2023 and 2024, Facebook app owner Meta Platforms, Tesla, Cisco Systems, Google, Intel, Broadcom and Salesforce have all revealed plans to slash at least 1,000 jobs each, according to this news organization’s compilation of WARN notices that they have filed with the state Employment Department.

At the same time big tech companies have been chopping jobs, the hype over artificial intelligence has yet to translate into a huge wave of new hiring in that sector.

“The recent growth in AI companies hasn’t offset job losses in the overall tech sector,” Bellisario said.

The tough times for the Bay Area tech industry might persist for some time, experts believe.

“It will be like this for the foreseeable future,” Hancock said. “Time to hunker down.”