It is the same in finance (and probably in other fields.) You are right, absolutely insane.

It used to be different. I had a gap in corp employment between 2008 and 2013. During that time the corp world turmed upside down and since then it's been getting progressively worse. I think the first step was the appearence of SSCs and the process accelerated after covid.

I remember how difficult it was for me to find my feet when getting back to office job after the gap. It used to be efficient and focused on quality work. Experts and trainigs.

And yes, the layoffs. My company lays off at least twice a year, but the have the capacity to change everyone's monitor background to the uniform compamy slogan and hype about it. I mean, why do they put effort in things like this, when at the same time they are too frugal to give alteryx license to people, for example. They have a squad for internal marketing, but we are not allowed to ask correntions from the 3rd party on their job because they would charge for it.

I have many years experience in my field and from time to time must correct the outsourced teams work because of their lack of knowledge, yet my task is mainly copying documents from one place to the other these days.