In 2023 the first major blow Technology Career, Sales Force – of San Francisco The largest private employer – laying off a tenth of its workforce – will lose more than 7,000 jobs globally in the next few weeks.
The layoffs were announced early Wednesday morning In an SEC filing and a letter to employees Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff dated Wednesday. It’s unclear if any employees, including those of Salesforce’s subsidiaries Slack, are affected.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about how we got to this moment,” Benioff said in a letter to Salesforce’s “Ohana.” “As our revenue accelerated through the pandemic, we hired a lot of people that lead to this economic downturn that we’re facing now, and I take responsibility for that.”
A spokesperson for Salesforce did not respond to SFGATE’s questions, instead referring to the SEC filing.
The round of layoffs comes after a tumultuous month for the corporate tech giant. In early December, Salesforce-owned Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield and Tableau CEO Mark Nelson announced their resignations within days of each other. Salesforce’s chief product officer Tamar Yehoshua and senior vice president of marketing and communications Jonathan Prince also stepped down at the same time as Butterfield. Their departure came just days after Salesforce co-CEO Brett Taylor announced he would be working with Benioff after a year.
According to an internal Slack message seen by SFGATE, Butterfield said his departure was not coordinated with Taylor’s or Nelson’s.
“I’m not going to do anything entrepreneurial,” he said in the news. “As hackneyed as it sounds, I’m actually going to spend more time with my family.”
Still, the mass C-suite exodus at Salesforce reverberated both locally and across the broader tech industry as a sign that tech’s brutal period will continue into 2023. More than 47,000 people were employed at 252 San Francisco Bay Area-based technology companies. will cease in 2022, according to Roger Lee, founder of tech layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi. A few hundred Salesforce employees Decommissioned by late 2022.
There were hints that a major round of layoffs would hit Salesforce even before the executive exodus. During Dreamforce last yearAfter seeing significant customer demand and growth in the early days of the pandemic, Benioff suggested that Salesforce would be affected by “some level of normalization.”
“Everything is still big, but of course some coverage needs to be addressed,” he told a press conference during the event. “I don’t think anyone would disagree with that.”
Affected employees will receive “at least five months of severance pay, health insurance, career resources and other benefits to assist with their transition,” Benioff’s letter states. Until January 2022, the company worked 73,541 people.
“Aggrieved employees are not just co-workers,” Benioff writes. “They are friends. They are family. Please reach out to them. Give them and their families the compassion and love they deserve. Above all, please lean on your leadership, including me, as we work together through this difficult time.
Something happening at a Bay Area tech company? Contact Joshua Botte at Signal Safely at 707-742-3756.
