There is enough until the company hits the early 2020 approximate headcount, adjusted for business changes in that time. The exact adjustment is hard to know, but in general, if a company was growing at, say, 10% per year, prior to the covid-craziness, then one would expect something like that natural growth to continue. Very generally speaking.

For example, Google had been growing somewhat quickly for decades prior to 2020, but in 2021 and 2022 it grew by over sixty-thousand people, and the crazy growth actually started in 2020, so even more than that. Sixty thousand!

Undoing that takes a very long time--they should have been much smarter about it. You need four rounds of twelve-thousand person RIFs (whether layoffs or buyouts) to get back to the earlier growth trajectory. Each round generates several stories that hit HN.

Is this MS still dropping back to pre-Covid? I would bet at least some of it is.

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logicchains 2 hours ago | parent [-]

>if a company was growing at, say, 10% per year, prior to the covid-craziness, then one would expect something like that natural growth to continue

A company growing 10% per year would be around 7x larger 20 years later. There's a limit on how big companies can get.

	▲	solyin 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Is there? GE, back in the days, did everything, and looking at Samsung as a percentage of South Korea's economy, would say, absent any government regulation like anti-trust, there really isn't. Berkshire Hathaway is one such conglomerate in the US today.