SAN JOSE — The Bay Area tech industry’s jobs sector has nosedived to kick off 2025, a plunge that is punctuated by layoff plans that a San Jose tech company has just disclosed.
Over the first three months of 2025, the Bay Area has lost a net total of 11,100 tech jobs, according to seasonally adjusted estimates that Beacon Economics derived from the monthly reports relased by the state Employment Development Department.
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In an unsettling reminder that the tech sector’s difficulties have yet to run their course, NetApp has disclosed plans to lay off 56 workers in San Jose.
NetApp said the job cuts in San Jose are slated to take effect on June 28 of this year, the company reported in a WARN letter it sent to the state EDD.
The NetApp staffing reductions come on the heels of warnings by multiple tech industry titans that they were planning wide-ranging job cuts in the coming months or years.
Menlo Park-based Facebook app owner Meta Platforms, Santa Clara-based chipmaking giant Intel, Mountain View-based search titan Google and San Francisco-based cloud services colossus Salesforce have disclosed their intentions to conduct wide-ranging job cuts as soon as this year.
The overall job losses by the tech industry suggest that the industry, whose health is vital to the Bay Area, is weighing down the nine-county region’s overall job market so far in 2025.
The Bay Area lost a net total of 19,700 jobs over the first three months of 2025.
This means the 11,100 lost tech jobs account for 56% — more than half — of the jobs the nine-county region has shed so far this year, this news organization’s assessment of the Beacon and state EDD figures shows.
Here is how the Bay Area’s three major tech hubs have fared during the first three months of this year, based on the Beacon estimates derived from the EDD reports:
— The South Bay has lost a net total of 5,800 tech jobs so far in 2025.
— The San Francisco-San Mateo region has lost 4,600 tech jobs.
— The East Bay has shed 600 tech jobs.
The technology industry boomed during the years of the government-ordered business shutdowns to combat the spread of the coronavirus.
Tech companies launched hiring sprees to support unprecedented demand for ways to work and learn remotely due to the huge numbers of workers who were kept away from their offices and students who were barred from their schools.
But as a growing number of people began to return to their offices for in-person work, the demand for remote tech connections began to fade.
Plus, tech companies not only dismissed workers in the wake of the overdone hiring binge, but the tech industry also stampeded into the suddenly sizzling-hot artificial intelligence field, spurring a further quest for efficiency — and job cuts.
As for the NetApp job cuts, the cloud services and data storage company said its staffing reductions were expected to be permanent.