Setting aside the things I'm feeling when reading this, I'm trying to piece together a picture, for my own curiosity, of this trend, and I'm left with many questions, among those:
* Are all these layoffs meaningfully based in some hard economic data (e.g. end of ZIRP and some real analytical assessments of the direction of the economy)?
* Or, is this some form of corporate herd mentality?
There's no malice in my comment, but I often teeter back and forth between "these collections of smart people are surely doing some data-anchored homework before making these decisions" and "nobody knows what we're doing and the easiest thing is to immediately increase profit, like my friends at that other company!"
I just want to form a more realistic and objective image of how these massive companies operate, whether or not that image may seem optimistic or cynical.