The article doesn't emphasize the biggest elephant in the room: The zero-interest economy ended and crashed the economy that rode on bloated valuations and stock prices. And now companies are gutting themselves to float the stock prices.
It was, it still is and its going to be like that from now on. The shareholders were made get used to ever-growing growth. So being profitable is not enough - the profits must grow every quarter. So this is a self-reinforcing, vicious spiral. They will lay off even more people as the economy contracts. And that contraction is aided by these layoffs. Talk about a snake that eats his tail...
Well yeah, but most companies still have a much higher headcount than before the pandemic so those initials layoffs from 2 years ago haven't cut through all the bloat.
It really isn't hard to grasp. All large orgs from government to private sector accumulate useless bloat over time if allowed to, since the goal of each employee is to grow their position and influence in the org at the expenses of the org, due to how the incentives for promotion are set up, kind of like a parasite .
And the easiest way to do that is to get the budget to hire a team to work under you, then you basically get an instant promotion to "leader/manager" and you offload your work to those below you while you chill "working" at home and take credit, and boom, the org somehow doubled its headcount overnight without any added productivity or innovation.
This gravy train was allowed to continue while there was an endless supply of free money to enable that added inefficiency, but now that the jig is up, the layoffs are a correction to that.
easy money, and a push to get a lot of things done. easy to vacuum up whoever.
there isn't an unlimited market for talent, but there are still a shit-ton of kids coming out of CMU, MIT, or even online factories like WGU that would kill to be at a FAANG or FAANG-affiliated org.
couple years later find the top 20% and drop the rest.
