Where are SEA’s laid-off techies headed?

“I wasn’t able to travel back to India to be there for the birth of my second daughter in December. I was laid off a month before her birth,” says Gautham AV, an engineer and former employee of Meta in Singapore.

“If I went back home, it would be difficult for me to get back to Singapore as I would have to reapply for a visa without a job in hand,” he adds.

Gautham is one of 11,000 staff affected by the retrenchment at the social media titan, which took place in November 2022.

For expats who were laid off, Meta had sponsored their visa for 90 days after the termination of their contracts. Now, Gautham has just one month to find a new job in Singapore. This has left him worried as time ticks away.

Across Singapore and the rest of Southeast Asia, many like him have been left stranded in the wake of Meta’s decision. Tech in Asia browsed through the list of employees axed from the tech giant and found that nearly 80% of them haven’t been placed yet, if their LinkedIn profiles are an indication.

This seems to be the case with retrenched staff at Twitter, Shopee, Carousell, Zenius, and other tech firms across Southeast Asia. These employees include engineers, programmers, and developers – currently considered the most sought-after talent among companies.

But despite the slew of job cuts, Peter Bithos, CEO of Seek Asia, offers another perspective. “All these layoffs are a slight dent in the demand for tech talent in the region,” he told Tech in Asia in a recent interview.

This was echoed by other talent recruiters and HR experts in Southeast Asia that Tech in Asia spoke to.

According to Bithos, demand for tech roles on Seek’s platforms – JobStreet and JobsDB – is up 180% in Singapore from 2020 and has risen 75% in Indonesia during the same period.

“In fact, when we look at the whole of 2022 cumulatively, the number of job ads for tech roles in Singapore has not only increased significantly, but it has also outpaced the growth of the total job ads in the country,” Bithos points out.

So who are offering jobs for tech talent and where are these laid-off employees getting hired?

Conglomerates as safety nets

Most of the retrenched are being absorbed by up-and-coming tech startups, recruiters say. But this doesn’t necessarily mean the newfound jobs at these startups offer a sense of security. On the contrary, the trauma of being laid off and the knowledge that it could happen again can make people think twice about a career at startups.

For instance, a former employee of Zenius told Tech in Asia on condition of anonymity that she knows colleagues who went through two consecutive layoffs in 2022 while they worked at two different tech startups. As a result, they have decided not to seek employment at a startup again, says the source, who was laid off from the Indonesian edtech firm last year.

Still a tough job market

Talent slipping away from startups