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The Layoff Lollapalooza
We tend to frame these layoff discussions around “what’s happening in tech,” because that seems to be the only thing that people who “do business journalism” for a living understand. Here’s Axios talking about tech layoffs, and here’s Yahoo focusing on Meta and Salesforce. (Maybe a tad ironic that Yahoo is writing detailed articles about layoffs.)
If you get beyond the deification of tech companies, it all does make some sense: tech companies have been seen for about 15 years now as places with big salaries and relatively continuous growth. We mostly ignore the fact that a lot of that growth came with horrible societal repercussions (not all tech, but platform tech) and we also conveniently ignore that a lot of the investor boom in tech came when money was essentially free in terms of interest rates. We can gloss all that over though. It makes sense why we fascinate ourselves with tech.
In reality, though, drive to the Charlotte Airport tomorrow and I bet there’s some small tile company on the feeder road, and they’ve probably had to lay off 10–12 people. And those layoffs mean a lot more in the grand scheme of life than some Meta account manager, who will probably land on their feet and quite possibly has an undergraduate degree from Dartmouth or some bolded name place. The…
