No one was sure about the magnitude of the coronavirus pandemic in life. After seeing companies closing down, empty airports and banks, remote work, and social distancing, humanity understood the concept of 'new normal'. The impact on the economy was quite large. According to Fortune, nearly 100,000 companies that closed temporarily during the spring will remain out of service until the end of the year. On the other hand, coronavirus boosted other companies.
Large companies such as Facebook, Amazon, Zoom, Netflix, and Google had good performances during the pandemic's first months. What do these companies have in common? All of them are related to technology! This gives you an idea of the way these firms are overcoming the 'new normal', maintaining (even increasing) the salary of their workers, and hiring more people.
One of the main problems for traditional companies during the spring is that the World Health Organization asked people not to gather in closed spaces, which affected these companies' daily activities. For this reason, the owners and managers sent their employees home to take care of their health and avoid infections.
But the tech companies already had an advantage in this game. Although the United States has hundreds of physical companies related to this science, many maintain their production through remote work. That is why companies like Amazon or Facebook hire employees who can do tasks without going to an office. There was no significant change, as this was not something new for these large companies.
But not everything was positive for the employees who did face-to-face work. America's prominent tech hubs were devastated during the pandemic as employees returned to their towns to work from home. However, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, said that those who hope to work where the cost of living is lower could suffer salary reductions.
The famous phrase 'stay home' allowed the digital entertainment industry to generate millions of dollars. The high demand for streaming services such as Amazon Prime, Spotify, or Netflix helped these firms reach historical figures. According to Forbes, the Netflix platform received 15 million new subscribers in the first quarter of 2020 because of the lockdown in March.
Thanks to this increase in production, the salaries of these companies were able to remain balanced. Also, companies dedicated to pharmaceutical research and development and body care had positive growth, such as Johnson & Johnson, which increased the salary of its workers during the pandemic. In fact, in addition to tech jobs, other jobs that maintained their economic level were related to medicine, nursing, pharmacy, delivery, sales, and food production, which explains the context of supply and demand that the world is constantly experiencing.
Remote education was another major winner around this time. Technology also played an essential role in education. Bootcamps, for example, invested heavily in their online classes, which maintained the number of students and teachers in the early months of the virus. In addition, these intensive courses maintain commercial and contracting relationships with significant tech companies in the United States.
According to Career Karma, Coding Dojo, one of California's most prestigious bootcamps, continues to send its graduates to companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon. These schools have high training of people in areas with high demand today: coding and data science. This same demand allows a web developer to charge an average of $69,000 a year regardless of the pandemic.
With this compilation, we not only see the economic power of technology and its workers. We demonstrate how the tech industry also helped (and continues to help) traditional companies maintain their production. Thanks to communication companies, remote work brought a bit of peace amid the chaos. This is yet another sign that all businesses and individuals are heading into a technology-dependent era.
