I was part of a layoff this year. I was the highest performing member of the team — and awarded as such — but my skip level VP didn’t like me. So I’m gone. It was similar across the board.. lots of my coworkers, many of whom were good at their jobs, were selected-out not based on performance either.

So yeah, sometimes you can cut the chaff this way, and sometimes it’s just a way for those in power to consolidate their crews. And sure… this is technically a management right, but some who were retained were kept because they were abusable more than they were useful.

The problem is that as the market increasingly becomes removed from reality the only thing left for "leadership" to do is follow the trends that their biggest investors are following.

What benefit would sound, thoughtful leadership provide in a world where the fundamentals have no connection with real world success? For years if you had made a profitable, viable and sustainable company investors would have scoffed at you. You would have been crushed by some investor hype fueled, unprofitable, impossible to sustain company chasing trends.

Reality keeps threatening to rear it's ugly head, but then we find a way to keep it at bay for another round of delusion. We all know something is not quite right but as long as there's money on the table we all keep playing the game. I mean we all know by now that crypto is a scam and COIN has more than doubled it's opening price at the start of the year.

I had a discussion with one of the CEOs who did that around a year ago, it turns out, it is just the usual influence and bandwagon ride, he said that the hiring is easier these days and unlike during the pandemic, “so we will let go those and hire others later, it won’t be a challenge”, and why he did it? Apparently from reading all the news that big companies are doing it. Now that was a small company following the big boys in tech, but why big companies would do that in the first place? Well, personally, I think it revolves around what said by Tim Gurner, the CEO of Gurner Group (1)

> We need to see pain in the economy, We need to remind people they work for the employer, not the other way around.

Yes, obviously he was attacked and apologized later, but he was honest, he said out loud what most CEOs say behind closed doors.

(1) https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/tim-gurner...

They have bosses/people with power over them like everyone else.

CEO is day to day in charge, but they have a board to report to, investors who will gripe, banks that will want more collateral of the share price falls, etc.

I’ve done all sorts of damaging things to keep people above me satisfied.

And I will do it thousands of times more over my career.

Gotta push those salaries down somehow.

Publicly traded means everyone lookin at that OpEx, and labor is a big part.

Elon Musk starred a fad. The other tech leaders had to get in on the fad or seem out-of-date. The thing about fads is you don't do them because they're useful or because you thought it out; you do it because everyone else is and you don't want to look stupid for being left behind.

Owners of tech companies aren't immune to the same foibles that drive all of us; they just have more money.