Lay-offs in the tech sector are coming thick and fast. In May, Meta announced 350 job losses in Dublin, with a further 720 jobs at risk at its contractor Covalen Solutions – 500 of these in AI annotation. TikTok has now formally offered 300 staff termination agreements following a consultation period, according to reporting by The Journal on Wednesday. It is linking its restructuring to the “latest technological innovations” and its plan to support “rapid business growth in the GenAI space”. Amazon’s Irish operations were facing up to 325 lay-offs earlier this year. In July, Microsoft announced plans to lay 2.1 per cent of its global workforce, with around 60 Irish staff thought to be affected.

There are other technology companies quietly letting people go, because their redundancies don’t meet legislative thresholds for public declarations. Recent reporting in The Irish Times indicates that Galway-based Hewlett Packard Enterprise has dropped its headcount in spite of making announcements about new jobs.

Anecdotally, tech workers report that hiring has slowed down; while they are still encouraged to refer friends and contacts for open positions, those friends are far less likely to even get a first-round interview than in recent years.

Despite the fact that the technology sector overall is still growing at a fast pace, for those who have been here before, the mood feels worryingly reminiscent of the days of the recession. The job losses we have heard about in recent weeks are on a smaller scale, of course, but the sense of fear is similar.

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