Or you're good, pragmatic, and riding out the storm. You can be a new guy at a tech company who will likely layoff or you can continue to do good work as an established employee who may get a hefty severance.
The hyperbole is a little much. Meta is pouring a ton of money into the Metaverse and facing some headwinds with regulatory and Apple's ATT concerns but they aren't even close to hemorrhaging money. Last year (one of the worst years for tech in recent history) they still walked away with 40billion in net profit. The money printing continues at a slightly slower pace.
Sure they would. They may be known but known to a niche group of people which may limit their success. Carmack is a self proclaimed hermit but he's been in the public eye for decades (through conventions, speeches, etc) and willingly pushes back against corporate bureaucracies (against Jobs, Zuckerberg, Gates, etc). That type of public persona adds a lot of clout and opens many more doors, genius or not. A genius hermit who doesn't rock the boat or is fine with the status quo might have a different path.
There's a big difference between stock options and RSUs. Nobody became millionaires off RSUs unless they started at Tesla <2018. I'm not convinced everyone at Tesla is offered options.
Amazon has been cutting a handful of their growing businesses aswell. Take for example Amazon Care. That team tripled in size YoY and was disbanded right before these layoffs. A growing business also needs a clear path to profitability.
Well summarized. I think a lot of people forget how anti-productive many working environments were before the pandemic.
My employer at the time had us working in a retrofitted warehouse as software developers. Huge sprawling floor plans with cubicle farms thrown in. The sound acoustics of the building, lighting (sky lights mixed with arrays of fluorescent lights), and the shear amount of people walking around my desk made it nearly impossible to stay focused for any reasonable amount of time. This forced nearly all of us to use noise cancelling headphones which in turn killed any sort of social aspect of being in office.
It's not just the save file in games like this, it's also all of the virtual currencies users paid real world money for. If someone has played 6k hours on RDR2 they likely bought a LOT of in-game currency and other in-game items. A huge potential for monetary and time loss.
You say that like these well established tech companies (like Google) haven't already optimized the employee counts and employee salaries needed to produce the (current) best ROI and also figuring for future company growth.
A bare-bones, scrappy team makes sense in the startup world but not the publicly traded enterprise engineering world. Move Google back into this world and it'll quickly crumble in a few quarters.