> Overstaffed big-tech fired a few thousand allegedly idle employees and (not surprisingly) saw no impacts on output. The part that's always glossed over in th

> Overstaffed big-tech fired a few thousand allegedly idle employees and (not surprisingly) saw no impacts on output. The part that's always glossed over in this narrative is that the remaining workers were forced to pick up the slack to keep up the output ("do more with less") which resulted in toxic work cultures. Ask any employees across BigTech companies and they'll tell you of this happening everywhere all at once -- formerly collaborative environments suddenly becoming cut-throat and competitive; high pressure and unreasonable goals for delivery; hiring being scaled back (except in offshore teams!) and new candidates being severely downleveled compared to their experience. This was not a coincidence; Sure, there were slackers scattered everywhere, but the waves of layoffs were completely disproportional to that. The real intention was to bring the labor market, overheated during Covid and ZIRP, back under control (a power play, as other comments indicate.) And who better than Elon to signal that change with his shenanigans at Twitter. If it seems surprising that output was not impacted (although I would argue a close look at Twitter shows the opposite) one just needs to look at the record levels of burnout being reported: https://leaddev.com/culture/engineering-burnout-rising-2025-layoffs-reshape-tech-industry https://leaddev.com/culture/engineering-burnout-rising-2025-... https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2025/02/08/job-burnout-at-66-in-2025-new-study-shows/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2025/02/08/job-bu... https://blog.theinterviewguys.com/workplace-burnout-in-2025-research-report/ https://blog.theinterviewguys.com/workplace-burnout-in-2025-... https://thehill.com/lobbying/5325471-burnout-erupts-among-professionals/ https://thehill.com/lobbying/5325471-burnout-erupts-among-pr...