[rdtsc]

CEOs have their own hierarchies. The little startup CEO knows they are a little startup CEO and looks up to big company CEOs, who look up to Amazon CEO or Google CEO. Amazon CEO does something stupid or daring and and then everyone sits and watches for a while then decides "Hell, Amazon is doing it, it must be good and we'll do it, too. Nobody can blame us now, we'll just point at "the industry" trends.

I's all about finding the next good excuse: RTO, AI are great excuses. They can tell those stories to the investors, the media, the workers who are pushed out, even to themselves to feel less stupid and guilty. "Industry shows working in the office is better, look at the trends!", "AI can do coding now, look at such and such, my nephew built a website with a prompt!". That's a whole lot better than "well shit, we over-hired like crazy and messed up, we're pretty stupid".

[irvingprime]

I've had a theory for years that the free market is mostly a myth, that really most business execs are herd animals who form their strategies by copying others. Usually they copy the ones in the same industry, making them all look pretty much the same.

That's one of the reasons we have economic cycles. It's because trends come and go in waves. When one wave bankrupts a bunch of companies, they start to dig out and then the next wave hits, endlessly.