Economy

It was a bit of a head turner for him as ever since he graduated from college with his EE degree, he only saw more demand for his skillset than any chance of a layoff. As he works in Silicon Valley and has been thru Lockheed Martin, Apple and is now leaving Microsoft (of his own volition for a better position at Meta) he has friends that have gotten caught up in the recent layoffs and even coworkers on his team at Microsoft. His take is that there was so much shortage of talent for so long that many companies, Meta being the most notable, were simply hiring engineers to capture the skills market and have them "on the bench" for the next great idea/initiative. After awhile that proved a liability and they ended up here doing layoffs. Meta especially had its stock turn sharply south and layoffs are a great signal to Wall Street you understand investors want profits not just potential. Other than the shotgun approach eLoon took at Twitter in layoffs, my kid thinks most of the layoffs he has seen directly or via friends in other tech companies have been strategic. Within his own team at Microsoft he said most of those let go were either dead wood or roles that were no longer of high productive value to the mission. It's not kind as some of those folks ended up in dead end roles as a result of company decisions not due to skillset deficiencies.