If the employees are productive, then why would laying them off increase the stock price?

Because the stock market likes reductions to costs and doesn't think past the current quarter.

This is one of the stupidest arguments I have ever heard. Amazon was worth a fortune even though if made no money for almost 20 years since investors anticipated future profits.

This is a well known problem with the public markets. It is stupid, but your ire should be reserved for the markets themselves not the person pointing out the stupidity.

Well known by complete idiots. Anybody with a brain can look at how the stock market works and see that it is actually a very long term focused market.

Over an over, this isn't true. Look at GE under Jack Welch. They sold off everything that made them great, but it sure looked like they were profitable, so the stock soared right until everything went to hell. Look at all the companies that have copied their pattern over and over to this day. Everything is about manipulating the perception of the market right now, not the perception of the market - or even the existence of the company - in a decade.

Long-term oriented markets wouldn't be dumping so much money into high-frequency trading. Instead of reducing latency, a long-term focused market would increase the minimum latency to disable that kind of nonsense.

Well if you're so much smarter than the market, why don't you go ahead and trade on this knowledge and make massive profits from your superior ability to see into the long term?

Because the market can be irrational longer than I can remain solvent.

Cope. A buy and hold strategy can be held indefinitely without additional capital.

Maybe they want to spend their time doing something fulfilling.

Sometimes the employee is in a low-revenue generating area where their department head is asked to cut headcount by 40%