Return to office is largely layoffs in disguise, all of FAANG is doing it, and have more or less explicitly stated that they have no rationale beyond “we can make you do this, so we are.” As you pointed out, they already conspired in the past with their no poaching agreements, so draw your own conclusions.
Yep. Not too mention the actual layoffs that are going on. If you actually look at the hiring for the companies with these layoffs then you find that they are actually growing their workforce while still announcing layoffs. That seems almost designed to depress wages...
In every case I've seen layoffs-but-expanding-hiring it's always been completely separate teams, maybe even completely different business units - which in a sufficiently large company might as well be different companies.
Have you seen any occurrences of, e.g. layoffs in a team of web developers while simultaneously still hiring web developers?
