A year ago, myself and other Director / Senior EM folks were sitting around in our Zoom, looking at our headcount allocations from C-Suite and talking about how while the company wanted hyper growth, we all needed to find ways to control the growth/not hire as many as the company wanted us to hire, because otherwise we'd end up doing lay offs in 18 to 24 months when the econ cools (turns out we overestimated that bit). Every middle managers saw it, some of the more experienced ones who had gone through this cycle before shared tactics they'd used last time to make it seem like you're playing ball (so Talent doesn't rat you out for blocking their Hire A Bazillion People OKRs), etc. It was a regular topic in our leadership meeting and we all covered for each other when slow hiring got brought up.

We ended up hiring 60% of the targeted headcount before interest rates started spiking and everyone else slowed hired before transitioning to layoffs. So now we're the only division in the company that has open lines and can replace attrition. Meanwhile two other divisions have layoff rumors floating around.

All these CEO "it's my fault" letters ring hollow with me. The responsible ones were the ones that didn't just hop on all hands and announce "We're gonna 3x headcount!" and instead kept their hiring rational, managing their board and investors as needed. People are getting laid off now, because senior leadership wanted to have nice happy meetings where they pretended we could just 3x revenue every year for every and thus any kind of spend was justified on the grounds revenue would surpass it sooner or later.