2025 Became the Year Big Tech’s Job Market Finally Broke

The original story by Jacob Zinkula for Business Insider.

The tech job market wasn’t just rough in 2025 — it cracked wide open. Layoffs swept through Big Tech, hiring slowed to a crawl, and job seekers found themselves in a slog unlike anything the industry had seen in years.

Just ask Mody Khan. When he was laid off from Microsoft last December, he figured he’d be back in the game quickly. After all, he had five years at the company as a cloud solutions architect. But a year later, he’s still searching — and he’s burned through his savings, fallen behind on his mortgage, and is now terrified of losing his home.

“I’ve been constantly applying, and I’ve had interviews, but I’ve been turned down everywhere,” said Khan, who lives in Texas. “I’m in a very tight spot.”

Khan is far from alone. Over the past year, dozens of tech workers told Business Insider similar stories — layoffs, bleak prospects, and intense competition for fewer openings. US tech companies have announced 154,000 layoffs so far, up 17% from last year, according to Challenger. Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Tesla have each cut at least 10,000 employees in recent years.

The broader labor market has stayed fairly resilient — slow hiring, but relatively few firings. Tech, meanwhile, has been an entirely different universe:

• Tens of thousands laid off;
• A wave of new grads entering the field;
• Employed workers quietly trying to jump ship;
• And AI tools turbocharging application volume.

Jobs have gotten harder to find just as more people are applying for them. On Indeed, tech postings are down 33% from early 2020. Companies are taking longer to hire. And US businesses overall are hiring at one of the slowest rates since 2013.

As job seeker Mody Khan put it:

“It feels like recruiters are looking for Superman.”

The fear of the job market has become almost as stressful as the layoffs themselves.

When Amazon announced another 14,000 corporate layoffs in October, workers scrambled to update résumés and send out applications — knowing they’d be competing not just with each other, but with tens of thousands of other laid-off tech workers.

Former Amazon employee John Paul Martinez, 35, summed it up:

“I am extremely fearful of the competition.”

Since 2022, Big Tech has cut 125,000+ workers, according to Layoffs.fyi — with 34,000 of those cuts happening this year alone.

Competition is brutal:

• The average job opening now receives 242 applications, triple the number in 2017.

Former Amazon support engineer James Hwang said he’d applied to 100 jobs without a single interview.

“The job market has been crazy hard,” he said.

To stay afloat, many job seekers are forced to ditch their Big Tech dreams — at least for now.

After being laid off from Apple, Lee Givens Jr. tried and failed to re-enter Big Tech. When he finally expanded his search, he landed a product manager job at a Toyota subsidiary — with higher pay than he earned at Apple.

After 17 years at Microsoft, Eduardo Noriega was laid off — and instead of reapplying to tech giants, he leaned full-time into the staffing business he had quietly built on the side.

“I never dared to quit,” he said. “The layoff was like an exit.”

Some are getting through — but often through personal connections:

• Deborah Hendersen, laid off from Microsoft, landed a Meta role after a referral.
• Andrew Chen, a recent grad, secured an Amazon software job after documenting his interview prep on TikTok.

But these are the exceptions. Many others remain in limbo — draining savings, moving in with family, or making hard choices.

Take Ian Carter, laid off from Microsoft. With months of no success, he finally packed his belongings into storage and moved to Florida to live with family.

“Rent without income is doubly expensive,” he said.

It’s a story repeating across the industry as workers face a job market that demands perfection but offers little opportunity in return.