“Obviously, people were feeling a bit unsettled,” Gundelach says.
She had led the emerging sales team, which accounted for 60 per cent of overall revenue for the Asia-Pacific region, and estimates that around half of the Snap’s local team were fired.
Atlassian’s Scott Farquhar hit the road last year to try to find new staff, and says sacked tech workers will not be out of work for long.
The company announced the job cuts with an all-staff email from chief executive Evan Spiegel, saying there would be a restructure. Then, 24 hours later, Gundelach says she received a calendar invite to a meeting to discuss the redundancy process.
“Basically, if you got an invite then it wasn’t good,” she says.
“The first emotions were sadness and disappointment. I think the two things that were probably the toughest were seeing something that you’ve built from the ground up not doing that well, and then culturally, I was really close to a lot of the people there. It’s a really tight-knit family.”
All things considered, Gundelach says the company handled her exit “seamlessly”. Snap extended outgoing employees’ healthcare cover until the end of January, and she picked up a new job in the local start-up scene straight away.
She is now the commercial director of travel media start-up Exceptional Alien.
“I absolutely love being in a start-up again, and building something from the ground up that you really, truly believe in,” she says.
“It’s exhausting, being a mum of two. I definitely questioned whether I had the energy, to be completely honest. But you find it if you’re passionate enough about something.”
It is a recurring theme for big tech and start-up sector workers, who often trade off some of the job security associated with more established sectors for high-paying roles with plenty of perks.
Late last year Atlassian co-CEO Scott Farquhar took a bus around Australia as part of a plan to find more scarce tech skills in regional areas. This month he said he doesn’t think developers and other techies will be “sitting in an unemployment line for very long”, thanks to the long-term demand for their skills.
“It’s still early in the days of layoffs and other things at a lot of companies, but I haven’t heard that these developers are not getting other jobs elsewhere,” Mr Farquhar said during an earnings call.
“What I am finding is those companies that struggled to hire developers previously are now able to pick up people where they couldn’t before.”
Global phenomenon
US-based tech firms kicked off 2023 by slashing their global headcounts, having over-hired during the pandemic digital transformation boom.
Salesforce fired about 8000 employees, or 10 per cent of its staff. Google is cutting its workforce by approximately 12,000, Zoom is sacking about 1300 employees, or 15 per cent of its workers, and 10,000 Microsoft workers will lose their jobs this quarter.
Locally, these firms and their Australian managing directors have been tight-lipped when asked about the size of the cuts, but stories are emerging as workers start their new jobs.
An Australian Microsoft employee, who was approaching a decade with the US tech giant, said he was shocked at the depth of the cuts after his role – along with half of his team – was axed last month.
The employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, worked remotely from regional NSW and was part of a US-based team.
He said Microsoft handled the process “pretty well” in comparison with other tech firms, including a generous severance package and ongoing system access to allow them to search for a new role internally.
The redundancy process
Having heard that layoffs were coming, the ex-Microsoft employee said he then received a calendar invite one night for a Microsoft Teams meeting with their manager and an HR rep regarding “a proposal for changes to your role”.
This meeting was followed by a five-day period to provide feedback on the proposal to make the role redundant, which was followed by another virtual meeting to confirm their role had been cut.
He has since already landed a new job, and says he thinks the cuts across the tech sector were more about boosting the company’s share price than any broader macroeconomic conditions.
“It’s purely that the share price is down for all of these companies and they’ve got shareholders watching, and need to look as though they’re managing their cost base, blah, blah, blah,” he said.
“I actually said to my boss back in August that I bet there would be big layoffs coming in February … because every year in February Microsoft lays off people.
“The only reason we haven’t done it over the last couple of years I think is that it would have been bad marketing to lay off people during COVID.”
Recruiters buoyant
Recruiters, meanwhile, believe sacked tech employees will have their pick of roles throughout 2023, thanks to the ongoing skills shortage in Australia.
However, new stats show that salaries have plateaued for the vast majority of roles since October.
Recruiter Matthew Munson says salaries for tech talent are normalising.
Recruiting company Talent’s annual salary survey, released last Tuesday, found tech salaries and contract rates have increased between 15 and 20 per cent on average across the Asia-Pacific since February 2022.
Talent’s managing director Matthew Munson says pay had plateaued for most jobs since October, apart from a handful of roles such as cybersecurity and niche development skills, which continue to be in high demand.
Notably, the salaries of business analysts have dropped 12 per cent month-on-month but are still well above pre-pandemic levels.
“This signals a drop in the number of IT projects being undertaken, as business analysts are usually the first people hired for IT projects, as they scope the project,” Munson says.
Munson predicts that salaries will remain flat for most tech roles and some could eventually go backwards, falling from their pandemic peaks.
