Regarding the copy-cat behavior, the types of personalities that tend to be OK with working for FANG (external locus of control individuals who are likely to conform) aren't going to put themselves out there and do what they think is best for the company when they can just copy what [other FANG] is doing. They view these situations as "omg, amazon is doing X, how can I justify to my boss not also doing X"
On the one hand, it's easy to be critical of herd behavior. On the other hand, when all (or most of) the other presumably smart people are heading in a different direction than you are, you should probably seriously consider the possibility that you're the one that may be wrong.
And what if all of those presumably smart people are literally running off a cliff? Like we saw just this with companies investing in obviously deadend technology like NFTs or the metaverse.
When I see these layoffs I see the exact same thing as the above. CEOs pretending that they know what they're doing, then other CEOs also imitating that, followed by driving off a cliff.
On the other hand, if you ran a company and didn’t overhire in the past few years to the extent of necessitating layoffs, you would have been going against the herd and been right, supposedly.
