It does if they use their stock price as a benchmark, which they do if it is a part of their compensation. Higher interest rates push investors to sell their Facebook shares and buy bonds instead. This means that Facebook needs to earn higher profits in order to pull its stock price upwards. Low-IRR projects are eliminated and with them the people who worked on them.

> interest rates push investors to sell their Facebook shares and buy bonds instead.

Wouldnt the stock price drop with people selling the stock. That didn't happen with meta with interest rate hikes.

You’re right, it should, unless Facebook counterbalanced the hikes with positive news during those days/weeks.

> This has nothing to do with interest rates, none of these companies are borrowing to hire.

The interest rate connection is that investors buy the company stock (driving the price up beyond what's reasonable given the underlying business health), because the alternative fix rate instruments offer negative return.

>And Meta, Amazon, Salesforce etc are only shedding excess pandemic hires. If you look at a graph of hires over a decade, the pandemic shows a huge blip up, and these layoffs correct that.

I think you're arguing against yourself.

Why do you think there was a huge blip up during the pandemic? Because their revenue was increasing at a faster rate, so they hired to sustain the increase in revenue and they believed the growth rate will continue. Why was revenue increasing at a faster rate? Two reasons. First, zero interest rates meant that people had more money to spend than before. Second, staying at home meant that people didn't have much else to spend their money on except tech/internet.