Intermediate Software Engineer

Hootsuite laying off hundreds of staff; 20% of workforce. Vancouver-based social media management-platform provider Hootsuite confirmed to BIV in an email Monday afternoon that it is laying off hundreds of workers. The company said it would not "share" exactly how many people it was laying off, but it said the cuts would be for about 20 per cent of its global workforce. In 2023, BIV reported on its list of largest technology companies in the province that Hootsuite employed about 350 people in B.C., down from about 500 workers the previous year. "Today, we made the difficult decision to restructure our organization, reducing our global workforce by 20 per cent," Hootsuite said in its email Monday to BIV. "Hootsuite wouldn't be what it is today without the dedication of our people. Each person leaving the business has made a difference and we're grateful for their impact. We're committed to managing this transition with care, and are supporting departing and remaining employees through the process." The company said that its success "depends on building an organization where decisions happen faster, ownership is clearer and teams are empowered to act with accountability." With today's changes, it added, "we're investing in our future: enabling better focus and execution to support our enterprise growth priorities and show up even stronger for our customers." Hootsuite has gone through major layoffs in the past. In 2022, it announced plans to also lay off 30 per cent of its workforce, which would have meant hundreds of workers lost their jobs. Some employees also ceased working at Hootsuite in 2020, after criticizing the company for entering into a contract with the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Multiple employees took to social media platforms in September 2020 to express exasperation after ICE awarded Hootsuite a US$500,000 contract through a third-party vendor. Hootsuite's layoffs do not indicate that B.C.'s tech sector is weak, TAP Network CEO Stephanie Hollingshead told BIV Monday afternoon. She said many technology companies are getting hundreds of applications when they advertise for jobs. "It does seem more company specific, and a little more targeted," she said of the Hootsuite layoffs. "I don't think it's doom and gloom overall, but it's not going gangbusters either." Burnaby-based gaming company SkyBox Labs in September said it was laying off 25 people, said Hollingshead, whose organization is a non-profit peer network for professionals focused on people and culture in Canada's tech sector. "Growth projections [in the B.C. tech sector] this year, obviously, are more modest, but we're still seeing some higher projections in some of the sub sectors, like AI and data science, robotics, fintech, and tech consulting services." Rob Goehring, the founding chair of BC Tech's AI C-Council and executive director at AInBC, told BIV that the layoffs likely help the province's technology ecosystem. "The positive silver lining when companies shed people is that those people have been in Vancouver, and they've had the experience of working for large at-scale companies, and doing things at scale," he said. "They then come back into the ecosystem for people who need to hire someone with a lot of experience." He said that AI remains a hot technology niche and that its effects are being felt in a wide range of sectors where companies are using the technology to become more efficient. Various news reports from organizations such as Reuters Monday afternoon cited unnamed sources saying that Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq:AMZN) plans to cut as many as 30,000 corporate jobs beginning Tuesday, as the company works to pare expenses and compensate for overhiring during the peak demand of the pandemic. The Wall Street Journal suggested that the Amazon.com Inc. job cuts would be about 10 per cent of the company's workforce. Areas for cuts could be "human resources, cloud computing, advertising and a number of other business units," the Wall Street Journal said, citing unnamed sources. Amazon is estimated to employ more than 10,000 workers in B.C. but it is not clear where those potential job cuts could be located. "I certainly have not heard anything about big layoffs or concerns in the Vancouver Amazon, Microsoft or Google realms," Goehring said. "Amazon has invested heavily in automation in a lot of their warehouses and things like that. I think that's starting to have a productivity benefit. But then, of course, there's a negative on the people side."

NetEase subsidiary Skybox Labs lays off 25 people.