[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)_/¯