In my experience there are two things that bring layoffs: poor sales and bad product management. When I was at Travelocity they had by far the best brand aware

In my experience there are two things that bring layoffs: poor sales and bad product management. When I was at Travelocity they had by far the best brand awareness and marketing. They also had the best pricing algorithms resulting in massive profit margins compared to the competition. Nonetheless they were destroyed in the marketplace. The biggest killer is that Expedia invested heavily in sales to the sacrifice of everything else eventually resulting in inventory relations teams 3-5x greater than what Travelocity could dream of affording. That was enough to achieve market dominance for Expedia. Then to make that worse Travelocity only understood growth which was a colossal strategic failure executives would repeat over and over. When it became clear to the original executive team they simply left the company. There was a later executive that doubled down on this and in one year converted a $100 million business to a $60 million business. That guy is still a travel industry executive. The final nail in the coffin is poor product. It would fail at checkout thereby dropping sales and those customers would never come back. It costs too much to maintain because of poor decisions about software execution. They would also make bad decisions about new initiatives until they doubled down on A/B testing. Then to compensate for all these product failures they would over invest in advertising which drove more customers off the site. Poor software execution resulted in my layoff from my previous job. The thing that has saved me from layoffs in the past was having a skill that was both essential and difficult to replace just by hiring. The thing that resulted in my layoff from the last job was a fragile product and the unwillingness to fix that product. This is why I have abandoned any kind of web related work. More often than not terrible decisions are intentionally made on the basis of immediate people replacement or immediate feature delivery without regard for how shitty or expensive the new feature is. So much of the time it feels like children are running the daycare because people with inadequate experience want to visibility and nobody wants to clean up their messes.