The big technology companies hit the brakes: Google, Meta and Apple stop hiring new workers

First there were the small start-ups.

Without access to money from big venture capital firms, many Silicon Valley companies

and hold back on hiring new engineers.

Now, with the fear of a recession very present in Silicon Valley, it is the turn of the big technology companies, which until recently were considered safe due to their large capital reserves.

Google has asked its executives and department heads to stop any hiring for at least the next two weeks.

In an internal email to them,

, the company's vice president, asks that this time be used "to review our staffing needs and realign them for the next three months."

The decision even affects job offers that had already been formally made to potential candidates.

The news comes just days after

, chief executive of Alphabet, Google's parent company, called on his workers to "be hungrier" and operate with a "more entrepreneurial" mindset to offset the slowdown in hiring. employees you plan for the rest of the year.

Although Pichai, unlike Raghavan, did not speak of halting new hires altogether, he did acknowledge that the climate of uncertainty regarding the economy

.

"Google is also affected when economic winds blow against it," he summarized.

The news is a jug of cold water for the technology sector, in which Google often seems surrounded by an aura of infallibility.

To get an idea of ​​what this brake on hiring means, it is enough to point out that

and that the figure is not atypical.

Alphabet will present its second-quarter financial results next week, and Pichai is likely to offer more insight into the market outlook and what the policy will be going forward, but it looks like Silicon Valley's time for skinny cows.

A few kilometers from Google headquarters,

has also decided to follow a similar strategy at Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook.

When last year he announced the company's new approach to the so-called metaverse (virtual reality environments where parts of our work and personal lives will take place in the future), Zuckerberg planned to hire more than 10,000 engineers to build the different elements needed to make it happen. .

Now, the figure is around 6,000 and Zuckerberg has acknowledged that in recent years

, so there will be restructuring throughout the organization chart, although not mass layoffs at the moment.

Some executives at Meta have begun to be instructed not to hire new engineers or request internal transfers for certain departments, such as the monetization teams, games, and the dating service Facebook Dating, which doesn't seem to have managed to become a serious rival to Tinder. as planned.

Further north, in Seattle,

.

This week it has begun to eliminate many of the vacancies it had available and laid off 1% of its workers as part of a restructuring.

Last May, he warned the Windows, Office and Teams teams (his video conferencing platform), that the hiring of new employees would have to slow down significantly in 2022.

The only big technology that at the moment does not seem to have reacted to the climate of uncertainty is Apple, but

.

agency

, Apple plans to slow down hiring and spending next year in some divisions to face a possible economic recession.

It is not, at the moment, a policy designed for all company departments, but the situation could change if the impact of the recession is felt in the income statement.

Like Google, Apple will present its financial results for the second quarter - in which it has had to deal with inflation, the rise in the dollar and the temporary closure of some factories in China due to the epidemic - next week.

Conforms to The Trust Project criteria

Know more

• Google

• Goal

• Facebook

• Apple Inc.

• microsoft