[Lammy]

> It seems like 5%/year is sort of industry norm.

That's because the people running these companies learned the hard way not to write their collusion down, so now they just all totally coincidentally act in the same way that ends up driving wages down and keeping workers afraid and in line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

[loeg]

Why would you explain this with a conspiracy theory of collusion instead of Occam's razor -- that they were responding to similar changes in market conditions, with input from similar shareholders?

[keeda]

This is not a conspiracy theory, even though what I'm about to say will sound like it. If you can talk to someone from the exec class in confidence (which unfortunately may require a close personal relationship or high trust), they'll tell you there was a clear -- if somewhat tacit -- understanding that the job market had gotten too hot during Covid and something "had to be done" about it after ZIRP ended.

Elon's layoffs at Twitter were basically the signal for the rest of the industry that it's time to reverse the trend.

[loeg]

Responding to identical market conditions in similar ways based on input from overlapping shareholders does not require collusion between execs.

[keeda]

Right, but I'm contending there is a form of collusion. Here's a paraphrased conversation I had with someone who's in the exec class when I remarked on all the layoffs happening at the same time:

"Elon has signaled to the industry that you can layoff a 80% of your employees and things will still be OK, and the rest of the industry is following his lead."

When I pointed out that that wasn't true, things were actually getting rather bad amongst the employees and from a product quality / safety perspective, the response was, "It doesn't matter. They've all decided the status quo must change and decided that they want to do the same things."

This rhymes with what I heard from other senior people as well. And suspiciously the same anti-employee tactics have been happening across the industry at the same time -- layoffs, forced attrition, shifting jobs offshore, RTO, increased workloads with reducing headcount leading to record levels of burnout...

Even if we charitably assume it's group-think, that's still a form of collusion.

[loeg]

A "form of collusion" that requires no coordination between participants and no secrecy simply isn't collusion.

[keeda]

Even if we're being charitable and assuming it's group-think, it is still a form of collusion. The group of competitors collectively decides on specific outcomes that are beneficial to the group as a whole even if they know that the individual outcomes are sub-optimal.

Look at the evidence: Most of these companies had been highly and ever-increasingly profitable even before the layoffs, and they knew they were burning employee goodwill. Are you saying their actions haven't been coordinated and just accidentally happened to all follow the same practices at the same time? Including things like RTO, which their own internal data proves does not improve productivity and industry data actually shows increases attrition?

Sure, there's not been a written industry-wide memo laying out a playbook (that we know of), but everyone is following the same steps. And you would assume there is no secrecy, rather than (as sibling comments point out) "they have learned from the last time they got caught colluding"?

That's more charitable than I would be ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[albatross79]

Because he's not naive?

[Lammy]

Please stop validating the language of the oppressors

[groundzeros2015]

Can you defend your point?

[Lammy]

They literally got caught colluding to depress wages. You're a fool if you expect that their goals have changed.

[zaphirplane]

occam isn’t a law of nature, it’s an expression or a sharp quip

I don’t see a conspiracy here other than sheep herd mentality of hire hire hire then too many

[joe_mamba]

It's not some global conspiracy, it just aligns with the end of the ZIRP era. Companies could ignore headcount and hire endlessly just to singla growth to investors, while free money was raining from the sky.

[dingaling]

Amazon made $17.4 billion profit in Q3 2025 alone. That is, they made so much money they couldn't find any way to spend over five BILLION per month even with this 'excess' headcount.

[joe_mamba]

>Amazon made $17.4 billion profit in Q3 2025 alone.

I think investors would prefer if they made $20 billion profit next quarter. Hence the layoffs.

[readthenotes1]

Are you saying they should be a charity?

Or is this like the old Soviet Union thing where people said they pretended to pay us and we pretended to work?