Between Salesforce, Lyft, Stripe, and Twitter, nearly 14,000 employees have been recently let go — with hundreds of them based in San Francisco.
San Francisco’s downtown is now akin to a winter wonderland — complete with an ice rink (that will soon have drag queens doing numbers on skates) and a massive Christmas tree (that was put up way too early). The City, too, is doubling down on highlighting the area as a beacon for tourism… never mind pulling that focus toward addressing the lack of affordable housing and the opioid epidemic making downtown feel dystopian.
Sure, San Francisco is coming back; we love to see it. But what’s transpiring in tandem with this mildly kinetic springboard jump is massive layoffs affecting many of the companies headquartered in the city.
We just received notice under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (or W.A.R.N.) Act that @Meta will lay off "approximately 362 employees" from its Howard Street location in San Francisco's District 6 beginning Jan. 13, 2023. (1/4) pic.twitter.com/XcgkSwwmf7
— Matt Dorsey (@mattdorsey) November 11, 2022
Twitter fired 11,000 employees in the company’s largest layoff, to date; over 780 the affected employees were based in SF; at this point, we’re making glue out of this dead horse we’re beating — but fuck Elon Musk’s egomaniacal demeanor. Meta, formerly known as Facebook, Inc. completed a like-sized company-wide layoff last week; over the weekend, it was learned that 362 of the affected employees were based at San Francisco’s Howard Street office.
Lyft, as well, announced it let go of 13% of its staff — or nearly 700 employees — though it’s unclear how many of those workers at the company’s SoMa headquarter will be affected. Salesforce and Stripe, two other SF-based tech companies, individually laid off at least 1,000 workers this month.
All signs are pointing toward both a looming economic recession and the potential burst of another dot-com bubble. Each of these potential happenings has huge implications for the future of San Francisco. And those pontificated realizations are impossible to predict until they come crashing down like the 2008 stock market.
So, yes: SF is in its tech layoff era, 100 percent. Let’s buckle up for the ride… and enjoy the pretty holiday lights while we dissociate.
Outside of the unemployment sphere, here’s a run down on what else transpired over the weekend.
- Democrats will hold the Senate majority after Aguilar’s win in Nevada. The control of the House remains on a knife edge, though Republicans are still expected to barely eke out the majority. More info.
- SF’s newest komodo dragon made his public debut this weekend. He’s looking marvelous and majestic and has already started his training sessions this week. More info.
- LA has proportionally more people suffering from homelessness than the Bay Area. A recent Point-in-Time count shows for every 200 Angelenos, one of them is unhoused, while one out of 250 Bay Area locals is living unsheltered on the streets, inside a tent, or inside a vehicle. More info.
- A small earthquake rattled the East Bay Friday night. The 2.8-magnitude tremor struck near Alamo yesterday and caused no injuries or damages… because it was a 2.8-magnitude earthquake. More info.
