I somewhat agree that layoffs are copycat behaviour but this misses the mark a little. It's virtue signalling to the market. It's telling the market "we are goi

I somewhat agree that layoffs are copycat behaviour but this misses the mark a little. It's virtue signalling to the market. It's telling the market "we are going to cut costs". That is the prime reason so yeah, there's some copycat element in that message. It's worth noting that advertising spend tracks GDP pretty well. In a recession, GDP shrinks and so does ad spend. Companies like Google and Meta are highly dependant on ad revenue so a recession quite literally signals a reduction in revenue is coming. But here's why this is all so much posturing. Meta laid off what? 17,000 people? Assuming an average of $300k pa each (they're not all engineers) that's around $5 billion a year in savings or $1.25B a quarter on revenue of $17B+ and net income of $4B+. So the cost here isn't zero but it's certainly a cost the company could bear if they wanted to. It's a choice to get rid of these people. Also remember that while these people were costing $5B/year, they were still obviously producing something too. It's not like this was 17,000 people sitting around doing nothing. That value is also gone. Lastly, for Meta in particular, they're spending a literal fortune on the Metaverse, something that's unproven in any kind of product-market fit and doesn't seem to be a thing anyone actually wants. That's costing way more than the laid off workers. If Meta really was batoning down the hatches, they'd kill the metaverse and cut down their expenses to support their core businesses: IG, FB, WA and ads for all of these. So copycat? Kinda. Posturing and virtue signalling? Absolutely.