Big tech might ahead of the rest of the economy in this experiment. Microsoft grew headcount by ~3% from June 2022 to June 2025 while revenue grew by >40%. This is admittedly weak anecdata but my subjective experience is their products seem to be crumbling (GitHub problems around the Azure migration for instance), and worse than they even were before. We'll see how they handle hiring over the next few years and if that reveals anything.

Well, Google just raised prices by 30% on the GSuite "due to AI value delivered", but you can't even opt out, so even revenue is a bullshit metric.

Already built in. We haven’t hired recently and our developers are engaged in a Cold War to set the new standard of productivity.