[squokko]

A lot of boards want to lay people off to increase profits, but they're afraid that if they do it, the company will seem like it's failing, causing high performing employees to leave and perhaps even customers to get worried.

But once there seems to be a moment where others are laying off, they can ostensibly claim to be doing a layoff because of broad economic conditions rather than because their company is mismanaged. This means that once a layoff wave gets going, it snowballs memetically.

Of course, if it becomes big enough, it can snowball due to non-memetic reasons (laid off employees have less money, spend less, and cause economic contraction). An example would be BigCo lays off 10,000 people, which ends their Slack subscriptions, which causes Slack to lose money, which causes Slack to lay off people, which reduces their employees' spending on yoga classes, which causes yoga studios to layoff, etc.