I don't know if these big companies are so foreign to my own experience that I shouldn't even comment. But the anti-layoff movement (is that a fair term) is so loud that it does reach my ears and makes me think what my own policies (plural) are. (I'm responsible for ~100 people)

It's got to be policies plural because there are so many things that actually go into not doing a layoff starting with how you hire.

So because this theoretically is somewhat targeted to me, when I hear penalties for CEOs who do layoffs I want to hear what is the thing people want that prevents the layoff. It might not be obvious but some part of avoiding a layoff should be a collaborative discussion between workers and management.

Is it to be more conservative in hiring? I'm on the fence here because (to me) the economically rational behavior would be for workers to be encouraging employers to over hire because that creates net extra jobs and drives up wages because there's more competition for talent. But net impact thinking leaves out how damaging and disruptive it is to lose a job. So maybe we don't want to encourage wild spending? Somehow I suspect we do.

Is it to put more pressure on employers to figure it out? I've never met a CEO who wanted to do a layoff. But it's pretty common to have a team where you just can't figure out how to make the underlying principles of capitalism work with them. Business is about making a profit on labor and sometimes you have a fully staffed idea that you just can't make profitable. I always assumed this was most layoffs.

But are these big tech layoffs nakedly short term selfish thinking? I'm so far away that I don't know. But if the employer has a staff that they know how to make a profit with, then laying them off to juke the stock price does seem fully wrong.

But the first two cases seem less adversarial to me and more like they need to be a collaborative conversation about how much shared risk people want. As an example, the startup ecosystem is theoretically built on the idea of shared acceptance of layoffs and big payoffs for the people who make those decisions, right? A VC makes ten bets and 9 fail laying off everyone.