this is definitely by design, but it is driven by public policy (reducing inflation), not private companies conspiring against their employees.

the worst possible thing from a central bank perspective is a wage-price spiral where employees can negotiate wage increases that keep up with inflation. increasing interest rates is designed to depress wages by cooling the employment market, which decreases income, which decreases spending, which then decreases the rate of inflation.

> I wonder if all these massive amounts of layoffs from huge companies are designed to flood the employment markets with candidates and drive wages down long term?

Massive? Head count is back to like it was on 2021, for all of the major tech companies.

What other explanation is there? The layoffs are Google were not tied to employee perf metrics. The company is still wildly profitable. The severance package costs are high, and they will likely hire in various places by the end of year or into next, undoing much of the layoffs, so costs won't really be reduced by much if any.

These layoffs were coordinated across our entire industry, starting with Twitter, to bring discipline and downward wage pressure to tech workers. Musk at least made some (implausible) theatre out of supposedly "measuring" employees to justify his moves. Sundar/Larry/Sergey just used a glorified random number generator.