Tech giants pause internship programs as headcount trims continue, Yahoo Finance/NewsBytes report
- Meta told employees it will cut about 8,000 jobs, or 10% of staff, and eliminate 6,000 open roles, while Microsoft offered buyouts to roughly 7% of eligible employees. - The squeeze is hitting early-career hiring too: Handshake says internship postings fell more than 15% from January 2023 to January 2025 as student applications surged. - Federal Reserve and Handshake data suggest entry-level tech hiring is weakening as companies chase efficiency and artificial intelligence spending. (federalreserve.gov)
Meta is cutting about 8,000 jobs and pulling 6,000 open roles, while Microsoft has offered buyouts to roughly 7% of eligible employees. (finance.yahoo.com) (cnbc.com) Yahoo Finance reported the Meta cuts amount to about 10% of its workforce, and Microsoft’s offer applies below the company’s most senior ranks under a rule where age plus years of service must exceed 70. (finance.yahoo.com) The immediate effect is fewer seats for people trying to get in. Meta is not just cutting workers; it is also removing thousands of jobs that had not been filled yet. (finance.yahoo.com) That matters on campuses because internships have become a bigger gatekeeper to full-time work just as the supply is shrinking. Handshake says internship postings on its platform fell more than 15% between January 2023 and January 2025. (joinhandshake.com) At the same time, demand is rising. Handshake says 41% of Class of 2025 students had applied to at least one internship by January 2025, up from 34% of Class of 2023 students by the end of their undergraduate careers. (joinhandshake.com) The pressure is especially intense in tech and professional services. Handshake said those sectors receive about twice as many applications per internship as the overall average, after internship postings in those fields fell by more than 30% since 2022. (joinhandshake.com) The broader labor market is sending the same signal. Yahoo Finance cited Bank of America strategist Michael Hartnett saying S&P 500 companies employed fewer people at the end of 2025 than a year earlier for the first time since 2016. (finance.yahoo.com) Federal Reserve researchers found employment in coding-intensive jobs has kept growing since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, but much more slowly than before. Their paper says coder employment growth decelerated sharply after ChatGPT’s introduction. (federalreserve.gov 1) (federalreserve.gov 2) A separate Harvard Business Review summary of new research found job postings for occupations heavy in structured, repetitive tasks fell 13% after ChatGPT’s debut, while demand for more analytical, technical, or creative roles grew 20%. (hbr.org) The result is a narrower on-ramp into tech at the same moment the biggest companies are spending heavily on artificial intelligence and trimming payrolls. For students and new graduates, the hiring freeze is showing up first in the internships and entry-level roles that usually start the pipeline. (finance.yahoo.com) (joinhandshake.com)
