Companies do strange things for accounting reasons. For example, going all in on cloud, especially if you're a huge company who can afford the upfront costs of on-prem infrastructure and can reap the savings.

It turns out that buying equipment for on-prem is capex and only tax-deductible once, whereas a cloud subscription is opex and tax-deductible year over year. So it makes financial sense to go with cloud, even if it seems counterintuitive at first because on-prem is cheaper before you apply these accounting concerns.

I think something similar applies with hiring when interest rates are low.

…the “something worthwhile” WAS the projects that the spun up and hired people for, which they are now shutting down since it’s no longer economically viable to continue.

Every single time a layoff is done, there’s a conversation about what initiatives are on the chopping block as a result. Investments that are now lower priority are cut.

It’s really quite disappointing that the prevailing sentiment on HN seems to be that all corporate leadership are a bunch of bumbling fools. Just like technology is more complex than it looks on the surface, so too are large enterprises.