Tech companies also benefit from over hiring. It gives them slack to absorb crises, and Fast Fuel to move quickly on new growth. Eliminating the fear of layoffs allows employees to take more risks and explore.

The current crop of tech companies cutting staff is going to lead to a large number of dead giants. The staff who services the layoffs will be risk averse, and defensible in a job cut situation. You see this in legacy firms where it takes 10 people to make a change because each person has a small slice of permissions required to effect the change. This pattern is by design as laying of any of the ten people on different teams would kill dozens of critical business processes.

This is not how you make high growth firms.