I'm surprised that Google and Amazon aren't jumping in and poaching all of these talented engineers from Meta, Stripe and Twitter.
For example, Facebook has some great people working on VR. If they get spooked about profitability, someone with a neuroscience Ph.D probably isn’t going to pivot to ad sales.
My hunch is they might be doing exactly that, even if they don't want to grow a lot at the moment since their profits and share price are lower than they have been. Poaching top experienced people can be done almost quietly, as it doesn't result in significant headcount expansion by itself.
Myself I took the opportunity to just improve my degree with an internship at CERN.
Later in 2008 while not being fired, I enjoyed the merge that Nokia went through with Siemens, and a few side effects from that, as they tried to keep going in a market with uncertainties.
Almost all companies cut IT spending to the bone for about 24 months. The rebound in hiring was pretty quick, but wages where suppressed until the later 2000s.
This does make me wonder if we’ll see some quiet reform in large companies as they hire people who have worked at major tech companies and can better make the case for areas to modernize.
Big layoffs never are. Projects and groups get cut and, while there may be some nominal effort to hold onto people who are particularly valued on the basis of perceived ability, connections, or or something else, there is a whole lot of randomness built into the process.
Google itself in that case afaik. Times are different now.