Tech giant, Microsoft, has began employee layoffs in a bid to align its cost structure with revenue and demand as tough economic conditions continue pelting the globe. The company had earlier announced plans to lay off at least 10 000 employees from its global pool of 200 000 employees. This is the first time Microsoft is laying off employees in the African continent with the Nairobi based ADC(African Development Center) being the latest victim, The company had opened offices in Nigeria and Kenya as part of its initiative to to provide tailor made solutions to African enterprises and had promised to spend $100 million in its first 5 years in the continent. The company has enjoyed a 30 year reign in Africa since it set up its first office in South Africa back in 1992 and has since then made major steps to capture a sizeable market share including the opening of data centers and technical labs across tech hotspots in the continent.
This is however, not the first time the giant is conducting layoffs. The company has also recently laid off employees in Washington and seattle offices. The US employees however are set to continue to benefit from health insurance for 6 months since the layoff period and other compensation packages. In the US, the employees targeted for termination had to receive a notice 60 days prior. The Nairobi based ADC on the other hand however, caught its victims unaware. For Kipkorir Arap Kirui, one of the affected employees, the week started just like any other. He had a productive meeting with some of his colleagues and had not anticipated any layoffs. It was at the end of the day that he noticed an invitation to meet with his manager in his inbox. He subsequently learned that his role had been made redundant and therefore, had to vacate the office. The company has however not made any official statement on whether the affected employees will receive any compensations going forward.
The firm had earlier laid off an entire development team in India with reports that employees had to sign an NDA(Non-Disclosure Agreement) before being let off. This development is shocking especially considering the company had just set up in Nairobi a few years ago, In 2019 to be precise. By June of 2022, the company had employed more than 500 employees who had been poached from local giants like Safaricom and others. Microsoft Offers lucrative remuneration, a factor that contributed to its easy acquisition of employees from local employers.
In the global stage, the tech world has been experiencing turmoil with constant laying off of employees. Twitter had to lay off most of its employees since Elon Musk took over the management of the social media giant after purchasing it. Twitter laid off employees in its entire remote office in Ghana and no communication has been made since then. Google, Amazon and Meta(Facebook and Whatsapp parent company) have also in the recent past laid off some of their employees while promising that there is more to come in the near future. This is a worrying trend considering the fact that tech giants located in the American Silicon Valley have collectively laid off more than 100, 000 employees in the past few months with more layoffs still to come.
Author’s Sentiments
A lot of people in the tech community are questioning the recent layoffs that have recently rocked the tech giants. At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, a lot of changes had to be made at the workplace for economies to continue thriving. Part of the changes included allowing some employees to work remotely through facilitation made possible by technology ranging from virtual conference tools like zoom, Google Meet and Skype among others to online platforms for submission and evaluation of tasks as well as management of employees. Students also had to learn from home using these systems. As you can imagine, this put a lot of strain on the existing infrastructure provided by tech giants. To handle this demand, the giants had to hire a lot of developers to satisfy the market demand by providing labor to develop and deploy these software tools a lot more quicker. The tools have since then achieved massive scalability and reached a stagnation point. Fast forward to 2022 when we began seeing a return in normalcy as companies have gradually pulled their employees back to the office. The tools are no longer experiencing a lot of traffic as compared to the lockdown periods and the tech giants are having a lot of trouble sustaining a huge wage bill compared to returns and therefore informing the decision to lay off some of their employees. In addition, several other factors have influenced the recent layoffs among them the anticipation of a recession, pressure from investors negative cash flows from new investments- especially in Meta since it had to discontinue its Metaverse project.
