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S.F. Data Highlights Bay Area’s Tech Job Losses

The sectors with the biggest job losses in the metro area from August to September were “information” and “professional and business services,” according to the San Francisco Controller’s Office.

In just the last week, Bay Area tech companies Twitter, Lyft, Stripe and Meta have all announced large-scale job cuts. Data suggests San Francisco’s tech industry job losses may have actually started several months earlier.

Employment data for the San Francisco metropolitan area from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests that the tech industry lost thousands of jobs from August to September, the most recent months for which there is public data. This was the first month-on-month decline this year. (The San Francisco metropolitan area includes San Francisco, Redwood City and South San Francisco.)

This data was highlighted by the San Francisco Controller’s Office in its most recent report on the status of the San Francisco economy. The sectors with the biggest job losses in the metro area from August to September were “information” and “professional and business services,” with declines of about 1,900 and 1,800 jobs, respectively. These sectors encompass most of what is considered tech. Totals are not exact, as the data is based on surveys of a sample of businesses and government agencies.

The recent decline comes after a major expansion of the tech sector in San Francisco since the late 2000s. With S.F.-based tech funders like Y Combinator generating local startups and a concentration of tech workers living in the city, many of whom arrived during the ’90s dot-com boom, San Francisco had a favorable environment for tech to grow, according to San Francisco’s Chief Economist Ted Egan.

That growth took a sharp hit in early 2020 at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, but quickly rebounded.

“Local tech employment had fully recovered from the pandemic by the summer of 2020, and was by far the strongest sector of the local economy between 2020 and mid-2022,” Egan said. The number of local tech job listings has been falling for several months, he said.

The industry’s latest string of slowed hiring and layoffs could be a result of consumers’ cutting back on spending overall and using technology like social networks less frequently, as they return to pre-pandemic behaviors.

(c)2022 the San Francisco Chronicle. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.