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The cynical part of me is wondering if they're all jumping on the opportunity to do some "reorganising" with ZIRP as a get out of jail free card.

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Wild guess: In the last 2 years they probably hired way more than the 15% they are cutting now.

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.

Yes, that's what I was trying to say.

This pop psych/business management article from Stanford calling it "social contagion", but it framed it in a reductive way so a lot of people on HN were mad at it

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34339698

I thought what this Stanford professor said was rather sensible, but some people want to believe that the tech industry always functions in a rational way.

Also a lot of people too easily fall for clickbait framing and they missed the point of the article, which is that layoffs have a lot of detrimental effects on people, don't always help the company, and can be sort of a cargo cult response to economic downturns. Instead they focused on the professor ignoring the actual economic causes, which is a fair critique but not the article's main thesis.

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