<story><title>Why are there so many tech layoffs, and why should we be worried?</title><url>https://news.stanford.edu/2022/12/05/explains-recent-tech-layoffs-worried/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>avgDev</author><text>This is coming from a &amp;quot;Stanford scholar&amp;quot;, yikes.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;What explains why so many companies are laying large numbers of their workforce off? The answer is simple: copycat behavior, according to Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Since the answer is so simple I stopped reading the article. Obviously companies should not care about the their stock dropping massively in the last year, rates going up and consumer spending reducing. The layoffs is just copycat behavior.
&amp;#x2F;s&lt;p&gt;Man, this guy must have predicted 50 of the last 2 recessions.&lt;p&gt;Edit: This is such a bad take I would expect to read it on r&amp;#x2F;investing in a most downvoted comment. A &amp;quot;scholar&amp;quot; should know rarely things are black and white. There isn&amp;#x27;t a simple to answer to literally anything in macroeconomics, or just in life in general really.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>roncesvalles</author><text>Really? I thought it was fairly obvious from the beginning that this is hysteric copycat behavior. To me the smoking gun was how suddenly in a brief period of time, every tech company CEO was making &lt;i&gt;absolutely certain&lt;/i&gt; predictions about economic headwinds in 2023, up to 6 months before the end of 2022. Nothing qualifies them (or anybody for that matter) to assert that. It doesn&amp;#x27;t even make sense to do layoffs today when you expect trouble 6-12 months later.&lt;p&gt;That and the panic from tech stock prices being decimated after 10+ years of growth. The layoffs felt like Boards and CEOs were smashing the controls until the numbers went back up again.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why are there so many tech layoffs, and why should we be worried?</title><url>https://news.stanford.edu/2022/12/05/explains-recent-tech-layoffs-worried/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>avgDev</author><text>This is coming from a &amp;quot;Stanford scholar&amp;quot;, yikes.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;What explains why so many companies are laying large numbers of their workforce off? The answer is simple: copycat behavior, according to Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Since the answer is so simple I stopped reading the article. Obviously companies should not care about the their stock dropping massively in the last year, rates going up and consumer spending reducing. The layoffs is just copycat behavior.
&amp;#x2F;s&lt;p&gt;Man, this guy must have predicted 50 of the last 2 recessions.&lt;p&gt;Edit: This is such a bad take I would expect to read it on r&amp;#x2F;investing in a most downvoted comment. A &amp;quot;scholar&amp;quot; should know rarely things are black and white. There isn&amp;#x27;t a simple to answer to literally anything in macroeconomics, or just in life in general really.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sam0x17</author><text>Regarding the copy-cat behavior, the types of personalities that tend to be OK with working for FANG (external locus of control individuals who are likely to conform) aren&amp;#x27;t going to put themselves out there and do what they think is best for the company when they can just copy what [other FANG] is doing. They view these situations as &amp;quot;omg, amazon is doing X, how can I justify to my boss not also doing X&amp;quot;</text></comment>