Salesforce, San Francisco’s largest private employer, is cutting off approximately a tenth of its workforce in the first major blow to the tech industry in 2023, a reduction that may potentially imply the loss of around 7,000 jobs globally in the coming weeks.
The layoffs were announced early Wednesday morning in an SEC filing and in a letter to staff dated Wednesday from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. It is unknown whether any employees from Salesforce’s companies, including Slack, are affected.
Salesforce’s spokesman did not react to SFGATE’s questions, instead referring to the SEC filing.
This round of layoffs follows a chaotic month for the corporate IT giant. Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Salesforce-owned Slack, and Mark Nelson, CEO of Tableau, both announced their resignations in early December. Tamar Yehoshua, Salesforce’s chief product officer, and Jonathan Prince, senior vice president of marketing and communications, both resigned at the same time as Butterfield. Their exits occurred just days after Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor announced his departure after a year of working with Benioff.
According to an internal Slack chat obtained by SFGATE, Butterfield stated that his resignation was not planned with Taylor’s or Nelson’s.
Nonetheless, the mass departure of Salesforce’s C-suite reverberated internally and throughout the broader tech industry as a sign that the terrible moment in tech will continue into 2023. According to Roger Lee, the founder of tech layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi, more than 47,000 individuals would be laid off across 252 San Francisco Bay Area-based tech companies in 2022. In the second half of 2022, a few hundred Salesforce employees were also laid go.
Even before the leadership exodus, there were rumblings of a larger layoff round at Salesforce. After experiencing strong client demand and growth in the early days of the epidemic, Benioff predicted that Salesforce would experience “some kind of normality” at last year’s Dreamforce.
