I think that people get really upset about layoffs like they're an example of poor planning, but in reality it's all a calculated risk. Laying off employees is

I think that people get really upset about layoffs like they're an example of poor planning, but in reality it's all a calculated risk. Laying off employees isn't a very negative thing from the perspective of the corporation. Very few costs are associated with laying off employees. A few months of salary, but that's it. It's an at-will arrangement. I learned in a business class that, mathematically, most companies acutally take too few risks. It's not hard to understand why when you start doing some the math: if you invest $1 million into 10 projects 9/10 of those projects fail but the one successful project makes $10 million, then your investment broke even. But our brains see a 90% failure rate and want to be more conservative with our investments. Let's say, alternatively, we invest in 5 projects to be more conservative with our money, but because we didn't take enough moonshots we never found a project that paid off, so now we lost $5 million instead of breaking even. This hypothetical thought experiment is why many companies should be over-hiring and taking risks. If you make a mistake, so what? You lay off the workers and you immediately stop paying for that cost, and you might even have something to show for taking the risk. Also, yes, it takes more people to build something than to maintain it. Employees don't like to hear it, but hiring employees that you deliberately plan to lay off in a few years is a completely valid strategy. If we want this to change then we need to have our governments have better layoff protections in place, like mandatory severance or notice periods. The WARN Act does this but only for large employers making large cuts.