In the end it is all about what stock markets expect and want. Before they wanted hiring, now they want layoffs. There is really no collusion.

In general I think the true leadership of many of these companies is overstated. Layoffs are way to appear to save money so they are doing just that. And the pandemic seem to have been growth in remote products, so they had to grow for that. Even if most of the new workforce might not have been needed.

It's mostly copycat behavior. https://news.stanford.edu/2022/12/05/explains-recent-tech-la...

These companies are either setting all-time profit and revenue numbers or just missing last year's all-time records. Wall Street wasn't happy that they just missed their growth targets, but keep in mind that all growth is compounded. So they have never been more profitable, and yet here we are.

ZIRP allowed companies to borrow infinite money at almost no cost

What mechanism allowed that? From what I recall corporate bond rates were low but not no cost low. Bank rates maybe were like a few percent but infinity money?

If you were MSFT or AAPL, you could issue 0%(or close to it) bonds and investors would lap it up. IIRC AAPL did issue a 0% bond at some point in the last few years.

In Europe, not in the US, as far as I can tell. Looks like the lowest Apple got to go was 2.2ish in the US.

Oh great another obscure abbreviation to think about.

The whole experience the last few years has taught me a valuable lesson about how simple and reactive all of these tech companies are. No one really knows what they are doing. Other than a very few special people, most of the leaders at these major tech companies are not super-geniuses. They are human like the rest of us and subject to all that it means... Irrational, over-reactive, subject to the whims of the stock market, etc...

I was a young kid during the dotcom bubble and in highschool during the '08 downturn so I wasn't really aware of the macroenomocic trends in the industry then, but now that I am older and deeply invested in the tech economy it's so obvious.

I find it freeing to know that no one really knows what they are doing. Looking into startup world from academia, it seemed like these people really were thoughtful and strategic in how they operated.

After getting into a couple very well funded startups, and seeing how the sausage is made, you realize that no one knows what they are doing. It's not that they're stupid, just that business is hard and the environment is always changing. Sure there might be some "master of the universe" types, but you can create a good business solving the most immediate and pressing problems.

Getting someone to give you money for a product is always hard. We see things all around us that we and others pay for every day, but that's just survivorship bias. It doesn't stop many of us from thinking it's easy, "there's n-billion people on the internet, if I can get 1%..."

I'm not sure why anyone would think the people running these companies are any more intelligent than anyone else. In some intellect measures like emotional intelligence they are even often quite weak.

Why would you assume that when companies compete fiercely that they are coordinating? Of course they werent coordinating.

Whataboutism is a word that has been abused badly a lot in the last year but it seems like it fits here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

The person you are replying is making an apt analogy between dynamics that drove comp up and those that are guaranteed to drive it down. If one was not collusion, what's the reason to think the other one is?