Here's a great quote about what's going on:

> I’ve had people say to me that they know layoffs are harmful to company well-being, let alone the well-being of employees, and don’t accomplish much, but everybody is doing layoffs and their board is asking why they aren’t doing layoffs also.

(Aside: this quote rings extremely true to me personally because several CEOs have told me similar things).

So why are executives who are fully aware that the layoffs are bad for the company doing layoffs? Because their boards are pressuring them to. And who are their boards composed of? VCs and other extremely wealthy investors. Just take a little deeper look at boards and you'll see that it's largely the same group of oligarchs serving on the boards of most companies. Firms like Andressen Horowitz are on the boards of hundreds of companies. This is not a grandiose claim. This is the exact mechanism for coordination in our corporate economy.

I'm not going to show you a cartoon puppet master villain. I think you're confusing coordination with something more like blackmail when you say you want "concrete proof". The things I've brought up so far are in fact evidence of coordination.

I never said "non-zero" so you need to seriously chill. Just because I can't dumb it down to the level where you can look at a cartoon villain pulling on literal puppet strings doesn't mean that you can discount clear evidence of coordination. For the record, Marc Andreessen said, "The good big companies are overstaffed by 2x. The bad big companies are overstaffed by 4x or more."

And he's far from the only big investor calling for layoffs. Another VC was pontificating on the McKinsey & Company podcast that the bigger layoff the better. Another big shareholder on Google publicly called on them to make massive cuts. The list goes on and on.

Now, let me tell you something. In 4 years of studying for an economics degree I never learned of a single reason why extremely profitable companies (ones that earn hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit per employee) should start doing layoffs in the middle of a strong economy and a worker shortage. Normal, sane common sense would tell you shouldn't even begin to contemplate layoffs until you are literally at risk of going bankrupt. And this is backed by research: https://www.careerusa.org/resources/career-files/158-resources/career-files/16-must-read-articles/372-lay-off-the-layoffs.html

> But some of the drawbacks are surprising. Much of the conventional wisdom about downsizing—like the fact that it automatically drives a company's stock price higher, or increases profitability—turns out to be wrong. There's substantial research into the physical and health effects of downsizing on employees—research that reinforces the seemingly hyperbolic notion that layoffs are literally killing people. There is also empirical evidence showing that labor-market flexibility isn't necessarily so good for countries, either. A recent study of 20 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development economies over a 20-year period by two Dutch economists found that labor-productivity growth was higher in economies having more highly regulated industrial-relations systems—meaning they had more formal prohibitions against the letting go of workers.

So, what's the alternative? That the wealthiest investors who control the tech industry are a bunch of massive idiots? I could buy that. But I can also point to the fact that these companies have a long history of wage suppression and anti-labor actions. And the've already been found guilty of doing it in court. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation

I'm going to trust the business school professor who says that there is no legitimate business need for layoffs and that the only reason these lucrative companies are doing them is because they are taking their queues from other companies (and investors) who are also doing layoffs. I know that it can be hard to connect the dots, but that's another way of pointing out that this is coordinated.

You think that Andreessen Horowitz pushing an agenda has zero impact on the tech industry? Keep sticking your head in the sand. Back in April that was the first serious red flag that there was going to be coordination on layoffs.

And why are they doing it? No legitimate reason:

> 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.

https://news.stanford.edu/2022/12/05/explains-recent-tech-layoffs-worried/

These people seem to believe that the labor market is in a "bubble". There is this big belief that engineering wages are determined by a company's market cap, or something.

You can have both. Many tech companies engage in wage suppression even as wages trend up. Earlier this year we had one of the really scummy VCs claiming that every tech company should lay off 50-75% of their workers and then it turned out that a lot of the companies they invested in started doing layoffs whether it made sense to or not. So you can't say that there isn't some degree of coordination.

It doesn't matter any more than a tulip bulb inside of cryptocurrency, either.

It's not stealing. That's why I downvoted you. Otherwise I agree. The only party that broke the law here was the employer.

Let's check on that ambition ten years from now.

> she said she had to rate me that way to make her numbers work

In order to give her friend a higher score, she had to give you a lower score. Don't you get it? You should blame numbers.

Police unions are not real Unions. They are more like gangs.

Industrial robots represent just a very small fraction of the machines on assembly lines. I don't know that it means anything if their use is going up or down, it's just another way that an assembly line could be designed.

> growing pains it has had has.

99% of the growing pains are still ahead of it.

You can safely assume that the size of the market is not that different from the number they already sold.

Doesn't mean it's a bad thing, it certainly sounds like a game changer for the places where it works.

According to the article, these are cost effective with an ROI of 2-3 years.

What if it just feels good?

Never attribute to incompetence that which is adequately explained by greed.

If I understand correctly this is a more messed up situation. They were not even ATT customers, but ATT was damaging their internet cables.

What stops Comcast lines from being cut under mysterious circumstances sometime after that?

If you're in Texas look at everyone else's power grid: actually works. The idiot voters in Texas got exactly what they asked for.