In the end, hiring is a transaction. Google does not have obligations beyond that, and neither do employees toward Google when there is a better transaction or when the terms no longer suit their needs.

Put more clearly: investors __do not want to invest__ in companies that are burning money right now, no matter their cash balance. Responsible, profitable growth is the goal. Your cash backstop is not relevant.

"Market expectations" are predictions of the future. Early pandemic, predictions for tech companies were favorable. They were hiring not because of quarterly targets or short-term objectives, but because companies believed they would be able to pull future goals forward. They are now laying off because future predictions are more bleak. With new data, we form new ideas. There are few companies out there saying "we're 100% confident we can grow 100% YoY for the next two years" but not hiring according to that. Their projections of where they will get have changed, and the hiring plan follows suit.

It's really easy to say this with hindsight, and we often forget/don't realize when we're acting based on it. The reality is that unless you (the general you) were shorting Google/DO/Salesforce/whoever in 2021 at their peaks, then it's clear none of us really know what the future hold and are all guessing. If it was so obvious then, there are ways for us to individually profit off of that.

So, being 100% genuine here: if you really believe you have a better opinion about long term value, play in the stock market. Short companies that are underinvesting in growth compared to their competition. Buy the dips. Sell the highs. But my guess is you don't have that level of confidence (I certainly don't!) and that should help explain why, as the person responsible for a >$1B annual budget, you might have to change some decisions you made when new data comes in.

And what justified these beliefs, to them?

"We need to lay people off now to focus on profitability"

Are they also doing any hiring whatsoever?

If in 6 months Jerome Powell comes out and says "no more rate hikes, expect to taper down from 5% to 3% in the next 12 months", does DigitalOcean (and companies like them) turn around and "go for growth" again and restart the (expensive) hiring process (after having just laid people off not too long ago)?

This doesn't really seem to be a rather narrow situation. The tech companies were hiring like crazy for the past two years. Quick googling shows that DigitalOcean increased headcount by 31% last year.

And contrary to the popular opinion here, for me this does sound like the right move for the time. The logic, on the growing market, was "let's hire people now for 200k TC and give 50k raise after a year, because year later they'll be asking for 500k TC upfront". Now it's clear the salaries won't be going to the moon in the nearest future, so it makes sense to cut the fat.

Still sucks if you're on the receiving end, though.

The fact that new loans are not cheap thanks to high interest rates is the more threatening factor.

Hiring in 2021 and 2022 was really out of control at many companies. There was a feeling that companies had to keep even the underperforming engineers earning $200K TC because it was so hard to hire replacements. That has changed, so it makes sense to start cutting the employees who were hired into roles they couldn’t handle.

My company had layoffs late last year. It has only made things more efficient. We lost some good people, but there were too many people assigned to every project. Half of our time was spent dividing up work and coordinating across teams for things that should have been handled by a single team. There was just too much hiring in 2021 when money was cheap.

So yes, they're just going to put some things in the backlog again, it's totally normal.

For an executive, it's a big difference in stock based bonus.

The executive level at corporate america tends to filter for status and financial obsessed sociopaths, so they make sociopathic decisions where they are content with making decisions that harm many (layoffs) but benefit themselves. That's how we got the enron, the great financial crisis of 2008, and many others.

However if your tenure is expected to outlast the contraction then you would make more money in the long run by planning for how to be in the best position to exploit the market conditions during the next upswing.

It's hard to do that if you layoff crucial staff that are part of your growth engine.

And I honestly think that in any of them, neither mass hirings nor layoffs are initiated by CEOs. I'd bet it's rather "one person pushes through the idea of hiring a lot of people, a year after another person pushes the idea of laying them off".

One of the challenges is people often think “where’s my growth going to be if my Senior Director/VP isn’t going anywhere for 5 years?”

That's all you had to say

If they aren't, why were they hired in the first place?

I've hired out technical writers full time and part time. And I've found it's far better to hire a technical writer part time or on contract vs. full time. The value to cost ratio is not comparable to technical roles.