I'm disputing the claim that the above statement was ever in question. FAANG doesn't employ people because they mistakenly thought they needed that many, they do it because adding more employees has either lowered their infra costs or increased their revenue.
I really believe the layoffs were not about needing less people, it was about gaining some ground in the employee/employer dynamic.
There are always low performers. Periodically transitioning out the bottom 10% or so, and rehiring different people, possibly in a different departmental distribution, is always net beneficial to the company.
Using regional/national/global events as the explanation is always better than blaming yourself.
Bad for people in the short term, of course. Arguments are made that it's good for society in the longer term. Wars are fought between opposing sides of that opinion. :)
this seems a gross misunderstanding of how software companies work at scale. Twitter doesn't hire engineers to run a monitoring system cause they need it to stay alive (there are alternatives to building and running their own!), they chose to do it to save money or increase revenue.
Twitter doesn't need an ad network, they can use Google, or build their own and take more profit. They might know that for every 3 engineers they hire on their ad network, they increase their click rate and thus revenue.
The same can be said for any infra team. You don't need to build much infra, but companies do it because sometimes it's a way to save hundreds of millions of dollars in cloud costs or licensing fees.