A month after Google sacked 12,000 employees — six per cent of its overall headcount — globally, the tech giant has laid off 453 employees from various departments in India. The trend of mass tech layoffs has reached the Indian shore, which is not a welcome sign at all. It might be completely rational to expect that other global tech companies, too, may replicate the global trend of mass layoffs in India. Notably, last month, Microsoft announced 10,000 job cuts, Amazon cut 18,000 jobs, and Meta sacked 11,000 employees, globally. These have been brazen acts without an ounce of accountability. Of course, the CEOs of tech giants have shown a big heart by giving apologetic statements as they made ‘hard’ decisions! When Google made global layoffs, its CEO took “full responsibility” and asserted that the decision was made after a “rigorous review across product areas and functions” in line with the “company’s highest priorities”. One assumes that the same goes for layoffs in India. Almost all the tech companies that have resorted to mass layoffs have cited the post-pandemic ups and downs in the global economy as the major reason for their ‘rightsizing’. But this idea of global economic pressure leading to massive job cuts is hard to buy. The mass layoffs have certainly been a result of serious mismanagement by tech companies. The tech companies that are firing employees today, hired extensively during the pandemic based on speculative growth and made big profits. During the pandemic years, major tech companies including Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft etc. almost doubled their headcount — Microsoft increased from 1,44,000 employees to 2,21,000 between 2020 and 2022; Amazon increased from 7,98,000 to 15,44,000; and Meta increased from 45,000 to over 87,000. Alphabet, too, increased its headcount from 1,18,899 to 1,86,779. Intriguingly, all the major companies got their maths wrong at the same time. The broader synchronisation in hiring and firing processes of various tech giants is indicative of partial malintent and not just misjudgement. Mark Zuckerberg’s justification that he wrongly assessed the pandemic years’ revenue gains to be a “permanent acceleration” is simple as it seems, but certainly not convincing — so is Sundar Pichai’s regret that he “hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today”. Indeed, the pandemic years must have been tempting for the tech giants to expand, but it can’t be the case that the company heads didn’t know it was a short-term prospect. The allegations that the mass layoff fiasco we have been put through is partly intentional, are not completely unfounded. To make things worse, the tech giants have now mastered the art of polishing their acts in a positive light — leading to a new trend of hypocrisy in management. While using plug-and-play tactics, they know their acts can be justified with a generic reason and emotion-triggering apologetic words. A blend of hypocrisy and incompetency appears to normalise a trend which is not normal by any account. It is not to say that tech giants don’t have the right to focus and strategize on their profit prospects, but they could certainly have behaved more ethically by rationalising their growth projections during the pandemic, and balancing between revenues and the employee base after economic prospects saw a downturn after the pandemic. Experts argue that while the post-pandemic scenario has made things worse for tech giants vis-à-vis the pandemic years, their profits remain intact, if not optimal. Thanks to the normalising trend, the mass layoffs have now spread their tentacles to highly skilled youths and millennials. It is no more just about lower-skill jobs and people in their 40s and 50s. India, as a tech-aspiring country blessed with an enviable young population, has so much to lose and gain in the tech market. It is reported that the Indian IT & business services industry is expected to grow to USD 19.93 billion by 2025. It is the responsibility of the government and the tech industry at large to absorb the fired professionals. This would ensure long-term resilience in India’s tech sector. Also, the chances of putting some kind of accountability on tech giants, if any, can be explored.