The bigger companies used their cash during the pandemic to go on a hiring spree, both bloating their headcount and their overall salaries.

The smaller/lower tier companies did not have the cash to compete with this, and now do not have as much to fix.

Also the layoffs in smaller companies just aren't big news.

Just google it,

Atlassian, Asana all did layoffs in late 22/23

Atlassian had layoffs just last year.

There's micro-scale reasons for why particular firms aren't affected by this, but that gets into the weeds of particular companies' roadmaps and balance sheets.

The macro-scale of 2010-2020 was 'growth, growth, growth', the macro-scale of 2020-2022 was 'hire, hire, hire', and the macro-scale of 2023 and 2024 is 'freezes, layoffs, cuts'.

>Today marks a very hard day in our 20-year history. We have made the difficult decision to rebalance our team to better position Atlassian for the long term, meaning we will be saying goodbye to around 500 Atlassians, or 5% of our employees.

https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/atlassian-team-...