You know all this shit about tech companies laying off thousands of people, publicly of stealthy, that has been going for some months?
What the press is not talking about is the all this is happening because the high management of those companies had hired thousands of extra people in 2021 and early 2022. Because their companies, internet companies that need people to spend time on the internet to use their products, boomed in 2020 and 2021. Their business thrived. Their revenue soared. And... They made financial projections based on the results they were achieving in 2020.
You know, THAT 2020. Without taking into account there may be some small extra factor that were making their products to get twice the usage than in previous years. They made very serious slides promising investors to get to the moon and back, based on how well they did in 2020.
And when people stopped being literally locked at home, the numbers of the internet business went back to above the 2019 numbers, but far below 2020/21, panic ensued. Maybe those companies weren't actually doing so bad, but holy fuck they were underperforming badly if compared with the projections and the promises made to investors the previous year.
So the same high management that was so smart to make projections based on 2020 data, now decided they needed to cut costs. Because they can't do anything to increase revenue to the same level, saving for creating a new pandemic, so if they wanted to take profits back to the crazy 2020 levels and fulfill their word with investors, the only thing on their hand is too cut costs by firing people, cutting wages and benefits, etc.
In a nutshell, stupid decisions creating awful outputs. For everyone, of course, but the people who believed their business were booming in 2020 because they were amazingly smart and brilliant and not because half the world was locked at home without nothing to do but browsing internet. For them there are not consequences of taking decisions any random 13 years old could have told them were stupid. They will still get their millionaire bonuses, their business class trips, their stock options.
Yeah, no, but "capitalism is the best way to allocate resources where they are needed". And meritocracy is real and those tech geniuses are there because how smart they are. Meritocracy, meritocracy all way down, meritocracy all around.