STILL HIRING: BIG TECH LAYOFFS GIVE OTHER SECTORS AN OPENING

For the thousands of workers who’d never experienced upheaval in the tech sector, the recent mass layoffs at companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta came as a shock.

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Now they are being courted by long-established employers whose names aren’t typically synonymous with tech work, including hotel chains, retailers, investment firms, railroad companies and even the Internal Revenue Service.

All of those sectors have signaled on recruiting platforms that they are still hiring software engineers, data scientists and cybersecurity specialists despite the layoffs in Big Tech. It’s a chance for them to level the playing field against tech giants that have long had their pick of the top talent with lucrative compensation, alluring perks and sheer name recognition.

No employer is making a more aggressive push than the country’s largest: the federal government, which is aiming to hire 22,000 tech workers in fiscal year 2023. Federal agencies have participated in a series of “Tech to Gov” job forums targeted in part at laid off workers, hoping to ease their own chronic labor shortages that have hindered efforts to strengthen cybersecurity defenses and modernize the way they deliver benefits and collect taxes.

“It’s a real opportunity for the federal government,” said Rob Shriver deputy director of the U.S. office of Personnel Management. “We have just about any tech job that anybody could possibly be interested in the federal government.”