Conversation Starter: What’s Going on in the Tech Job Market?

What’s going on with the tech job market? Despite prominent layoffs in the headlines since the end of 2022 and continuing into 2024, the job market overall remains resilient. Is tech specifically shedding jobs rapidly as headlines might imply, or is it more resilient like the rest of the job market?

The “Information” sector has lost 92,000 jobs year-over-year as of November 2023, according to government data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which seems to align with the headlines of layoffs.

However, “Information” also includes industries that we don’t commonly consider as “tech”, which conjures images of tech giants like Google or Meta. For example, Hollywood, newspapers, book publishing and libraries are included in “Information”. Telecommunications is also included, which is less popularly thought of as high-tech today.

Splitting the Information subindustries into “New Tech” and “Traditional Information” reveals which group are driving recent job losses. “Traditional Information” subindustries lost 70,700 jobs year-over-year as of November 2023, accounting for more than 3 in 4 (78%) jobs lost in Information and a 4% drop in employment.

By contrast, new tech industries have fared slightly better, losing only 19,900 jobs, just 1% of their employment.

Looking at “Information” overall may overstate weakness in tech as these “Traditional Information” subindustries have been secularly declining since the 2001 recession which have lost almost half (46%) of their total employment since their 2001 peak. By contrast, employment in “New Tech” industries shot up in the 2010s and has now surpassed “Traditional Information” for the first time.

The reason that it may feel like the sky is falling in the tech industry is that even the modest job losses in 2023 are a harsh reversal from the blockbuster growth in tech over the last decade. Employment in “New Tech” grew 10% in 2021 and 9% in 2022, compared to the -1% decline in 2023 (through November). Similarly, the tech industry experienced three straight months of job losses in 2023, for the first time since 2009.

Each of the individual Information subindustries has a different pattern, but for tech, the strength in computing infrastructure providers, data processing, web hosting, and related services is a good sign as they form the backbone of tech expansion.

Overall, the Information sector includes subindustries that are both not commonly thought of as tech and are secularly declining. Focusing on “New Tech” industries specifically shows a fairly modest drop in employment over 2023, but this is still a strong contrast against the rapid growth over the last decade. Ultimately, 2023 may have been the worst year for tech in over a decade, explaining poor sentiment, even though the data reveals stagnation rather than a significant tech job recession.

Methodology

Payroll employment data is from the Current Employment Statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Data is from the December 2023 vintage; however, because data for smaller subindustries is lagged by an extra month, the data above is calculated through November 2023 to preserve comparability.

Information subindustries are manually grouped into “New Tech” and “Traditional Information” based on the following grouping:

Traditional Information:

New Tech:

Conversation Starters are a periodic series of charts and data points from Glassdoor’s Economic Research team aimed at sparking conversations on timely trends in employee satisfaction, workplace community, the future of work, and the labor market more broadly.