If I might adorn my hat of tin-foil for a second; at a big corp I used to work at, I heard execs predicting this outcome back in early 2022 in combination with being incredibly relaxed about the employment market being extremely hot at the time.
e.g. the same consulting firms are hired by all companies, and they will give the same advice when dealing with falling revenues, plunging stock prices etc.
Unless an IT admin stumbles across some interesting emails...
At one time, messages that bounced were sent to postmaster - possibly in hopes back then (when things were smaller) that the postmaster would know who it should have been sent to and pass the email on.
One of the night shift sysadmins who was responsible for postmaster at Sun got an email that was misaddressed between a few manager+ level people for what would be considered constructed dismissal of a number of people.
The following day, the people mentioned in that email found a printout on their chairs.
... and a change request when in to only include the headers(?) of the email message to postmaster rather than the body.
The price for that is just some more attrition and losing a bit of culture, both things that aren't priced in for their bonuses/stocks and so the C-level couldn't care less.
Right now, they've taken away or trimmed many benefits and increased expectations around performance. Will a change in hiring make them change the benefits structure, or will this be the new normal?
In particular, if there is a large backlog of workers looking for jobs after several quarters of reduced hiring, it will likely allow them to revisit compensation. It all depends on how exactly this pans out.
But I also don't think explicit collusion is actually necessary. Once one does it, the others can follow without fear of losing staff to the others. Meta and Twitter started the fire, the others can just toss in some logs.
So it has the effective material results as if there was a conspiracy, without the need for it.
I agree but at the same time there was noise from the boardroom throughout the industry even BEFORE these layoffs at Meta, that this was coming.
I'm not convinced that Twitter is necessarily as relevant a data point given they were actually burning cash at the time and its understandable that a new (and possibly even reluctant) owner might want to rectify that.
no collusion necessary to be familiar with history
I don't think that has necessarily happened. I've seen people write that Google's firings at least feel somewhat arbitrary.
They denied it and it was later proven out.
Basically, don't attribute to malice etc...