Exactly. This is a layoff without having to pay severance. Tech companies have realized there is no reason to pay their employees living in the U.S. a premium.

Exactly. This is a layoff without having to pay severance. Tech companies have realized there is no reason to pay their employees living in the U.S. a premium. There was a belief, whether true or not, that having their best employees working together in the same space gave them outsized returns. But now their most expensive employees refuse to work together in the same space. The only question these companies have now is how to offload them fast enough to replace them with cheaper employees in Asia, Eastern Europe, and South America. As a bonus, those employees are even more likely to come into the office and gain whatever multiplier effect working physically with each other the CEOs of tech companies believe might exist.