Who gave tech CEOs permission to blame their mistakes of the past 2 years on ZIRP ? This has become a kind of meme. The problem is, ZIRP has been the reality, on and off (mostly on), since 2008.
> Starting in the middle of 2020, the world moved in an unprecedented environment for many companies. As interest rates plummeted to 0% and monetary policy pushed lots of money into the economy, companies had easy access to capital, and demand for products and services surged. Organizations hired aggressively to meet market demand and the war for talent reached a fever pitch. The result, for Lattice, was that growth skyrocketed. [We either ignorantly assumed it would be like this forever, or knowingly took the risk that we'd have to lay people off when the economic picture meaningfully changed.]
> Fast forward a couple of years to 2023, and the economic picture has meaningfully changed.
(Aside, anyone else annoyed that so many companies have adopted the term "impacted" as the verb to refer to people who were laid off? The company is experiencing a layoff, an event as a noun, through which coworkers are impacted. Maybe I've only noticed this recently. It rubs me the wrong way, as we're avoiding saying what happened out loud, like the company is absolved from their responsibility as the subject performing the act of firing on the object. That said, the severance here is fairly generous so this isn't a knock on Lattice so much as pervasive SV culture.)
Maybe Lattice did the right thing, given the circumstances, but surely not all of the other headcount-exploding companies did. It seems like a copout to blame it all on ZIRP going away and not actual corporate leadership.
And yes I understand fiscal environments might compel said leadership to pursue that path, either as a game theory thing or because boards and investors agitate for it. But it still seems wrong to blame it all on the Fed and not bear any responsibility.
15% which is 100 people in their case isn't even that much, they could have implemented a hiring stop and trimmed low performers over the next 6-12 months ending up with the same headcount.
Wild guess 2: Since they are letting go so few people, they'll do another round in the future.
The most successful companies/investors seem to be the ones which kept assuming ZIRP would continue when it shouldn't. What we should take away from that is probably worth an entire separate conversation, but it was the general sentiment. You couldn't really explain the size of VC deals any other way than "invested somewhere is better than invested no where".
Edit: Re another comment of band wagoning - It could simply be easier to do because others are already doing it, sure, but there are plenty of HN posts explaining the huge risk you're taking by laying people off to losing your best people.