Do they really need to "try" by laying peole off? Why is this the standard move despite the business and finances are still booming? It's a weird MBA monkey mimicry game.

How many layoff announcements have you seen where the company says "We'd love to keep pursuing this but we flat out can't afford to pay you, we are out of money"? I've seen zero. I understand some of this is prudent financial planning, especially for SMBs, but SFDC and AMZN.. they must be using different calculus.

Amazon appears less dependent on the nearly-free-money-gravy-train compared to most businesses, especially VC and startups.

Edit: dkrich's comment said it better than I can: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34254450

Companies, especially tech companies, invest in their future. Sometimes those bets don’t pay off, sometimes it’s because of external factors. That doesn’t mean those were bad bets necessarily, they just got unlucky. It does mean investors want them to move on to something else though, even if the company as a whole isn’t in a crisis.

If your best guess for what the market is going to be in 3-5 years is now half what you were guessing last week, surely that means you make some changes, and past a certain point you want to make a bigger change than what's going to happen by just freezing hiring and waiting for natural attrition. I'm no fan of companies doing this, but the logic makes sense.