> Hiring theoretically permanent employees in response is simply bad judgement.

This is not self-evident. Hiring the salaried employees over 2+ years could very well be cheaper than contractors.

If they had under-hired during to boom, then we would not have layoff today but the company would not have grown as much. The incentives are set to hire people when you need them and fire them when you don't anymore. Layoffs are not expensive or damaging to the company; they don't have any reason to avoid them. Zoom's stock went up in response to the firing.

I think this is the key opinion in a nutshell. Some people see layoffs as bad management and other people simply don't

I'm confused as to your proposed solution. Should the new employees not been hired, and existing employees overworked due to understaffing? Should they have hired contractors and not paid benefits like healthcare?

The companies I'm aware of that exist in cyclic industries (game dev, retail) tend to either have brutal cyclical layoff periods, leverage a ton of contractors, outsource their work to other firms, or hire seasonal workers.

What in your view is "the right way to handle this sort of thing"?

> What in your view is "the right way to handle this sort of thing"?

Don't lead people to think that their positions are permanent when you know very well that there's a good chance they aren't. The easiest way to to make time-limited contracts. That doesn't mean you can't give them benefits such as health insurance.

Except no position is permanent, even by the most liberal interpretation of full-time.

> The growth over the last two years was clearly going to be a temporary blip.

I'm sorry, but this is the most hindsight is 20/20, armchair CEO thing I've ever heard. Unless you have some sort of magic 8 ball, there was nothing clear about it being temporary, a blip, or any timeline of such.

In fact some people relocated away from tech hubs, a huge bet on a remote first future. (I’m not one of them.)