Conversation Starter: How Has Tech Fared in Past Recessions?

The tech industry has continued to grip headlines in 2024 with more layoffs at several major tech companies. In a previous Conversation Starter, we looked at what BLS data shows about tech jobs, based on a manually defined subset of “Information” subindustries. In this post, we look at how tech employment has trended during past recessions compared to the present day.

The most severe recession that the tech industry has experienced is the 2001 recession following the dotcom bubble bursting where tech employment dropped a whopping 16% and did not recover to pre-recession levels until 2014. The 2008 recession arrived during this recovery period, resulting in a 4% drop in tech jobs that was recovered in under 4 years.

By contrast, the tech industry was almost completely unphased by the 1990 recession. Similarly, the tech industry rebounded from the Covid recession very quickly with tech jobs skyrocketing during the recovery.

While we are not currently in an official recession, tech employment has declined 1.9% from their peak in December 2022 through February 2024. Tech has had extremely varied trajectories in past recessions which make the current decline difficult to compare. Regardless, even a fairly muted decline in tech jobs is a far cry from the explosive growth in 2021 and 2022 leading up to the recent decline.

Methodology

Payroll employment data is from the Current Employment Statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Data is updated through February 2024 but is from the March 2024 vintage because data for smaller subindustries is lagged by an extra month. “Tech” is defined as a subset of “Information” subindustries, including:

Conversation Starters are a periodic series of charts and data points from Glassdoor’s Economic Research team aimed at sparking conversations on timely trends in employee satisfaction, workplace community, the future of work, and the labor market more broadly.