Technology revenue and jobs accelerated during the pandemic when the rapid adoption of work-from-home policies created a surge in demand for all kinds of technology products from workers and businesses flush with stimulus and Paycheck Protection Program cash.
But that party is over. In the last several months many tech giants have announced layoffs, and Oregon's largest tech employer has been no exception: Intel revealed a new round of layoffs this month.
Click through the slideshow above to see 20 firms appearing in the Portland Business Journal's technology lists this year and last year that grew regional and global employment the most. Firms were ranked based on six equally weighted factors: current regional employee count; regional employees added 2022-23; regional employee percentage growth 2022-23; current global employee count; global employees added 2022-23; and global employee percentage growth 2022-23.
Yet the tech sector has become ever-more diversified and embedded in every industry and segment of the economy, so plenty of firms have been hiring amidst all the talk of layoffs. Beaverton's Biamp Systems LLC has been steadily hiring, for example, though the firm didn't make the top 20 fastest-hiring cut because they weren't in the PBJ's tech lists last year.
A total of 83 tech companies — 87% of them locally headquartered — responded to the PBJ's technology firms survey this year. Among them, Oregon and S.W. Washington employment remained flat at 30,359, but their global employment grew by 5%, to 915,486. More than a quarter of the firms had a stake in at least one of the following four fields: software-as-a-service, IT and network integration, cloud computing and enterprise software.
The Lists
Last week, the PBJ published three technology lists based on the annual tech survey.
The List of Technology Service Providers was topped by ZoomInfo of Vancouver with 670 employees in the region, an 11% decline, and 3,5000 companywide, about the same as last year. It didn't make the cut for the fastest-hiring firms above.
The List of Hardware Design & Manufacturing Firms was again led (by a huge margin) by California-based Intel, which reported the same regional and companywide employment this year and last year: 22,328 and 121,000, respectively. Therefore, it wasn't among the fastest-hiring either.
Beaverton-based Tektronix was No. 1 on The List of Software Development Firms this year, with over 1,000 total employees, all locally based, but it did not respond to the survey last year and thus was not in the gallery above.
