I really enjoyed The Atlantic's take:<p><i>> Shedding employees when everybody else is doing it avoids drawing public scrutiny to or creating reputational damage for a given firm (...) But if a firm downsizes when everyone else is doing it, the public seldom notices and investors seldom care</i><p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/why-are-layoffs-contagious/673021/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/why-are-la...</a>
Because they have cover to do so now.<p>The game for the last several years was to hoover as much talent as possible to prevent competitors from beating you to it, even if you ended up with more people than useful work and even if you ended up with a lot of poor performers. And during that phase, it hurts further recruiting to let anyone go because you look like the singularly bad actor. The boats were all out trawling for whatever they'd catch.<p>Now, the perception of a turned economy and tightening money supply has let everybody <i>finally</i> exhale and start purging and pruning without a targeted reputation hit because everybody's doing it. The boats are back in harbor and are sorting through their take.<p>If this is your first time around, welcome to the industry!
To save money I suppose, or reinvest that money in new technology.<p>Case in point, the latest AI offerings by Microsoft and Google have supposedly increased costs by 10x, so perhaps they see layoffs as a way of offsetting those costs.