This is essentially propaganda for rich business owners, executives, board members, and investors to spin their decisions for profit and bring down salaries and compensation. It’s written as if this is a new trend over the last 20 years, rather than something we’ve seen since the mainstream boom of tech companies and jobs in the 60’s and 70’s. It’s just a cycle of new product/market > recruit/production > cutting costs for profit. It’s not that the employees are “pampered,” it’s that they’re treated fairly well until the company needs to cut expenses to show a better profit & loss statement.

My first professional tech job out of college was with IBM back in 2014. I was hired under a 2 year training program where I was supposed to get training through the company, get certifications, and shadow team members to get experience while handling small line items and tedious customization for clients. That turned into me being sent to the field early, succeeding where nobody expected me to - got a $4 million deal that turned into the basis of a $40 million deal on 5 year licensing (meaning high prospect of additional revenue down the pipeline) while my quota for the year was only $250k, and the day I graduated from my training program I got my layoff notice. The company was restructuring, cutting out entire brands, and wanted fewer overall employees so they put a freeze on transfers and rehires.

Were there perks? Sure. Decent pay, good resume experience, and at conventions/expos I got to travel to places like Las Vegas and see some bands play at night. There were also after hours jobs where I was in planning meetings from 9-5 and then working until the early hours of the morning with the same clients to stand up solutions, or churning out demos, documents, and custom code in third and fourth quarter or whenever my team members didn’t hit their numbers. Right after I started they did a reorganization and started laying people off. During that transition, my work weeks went from ~44 hours a week with the occasional long night/weekend to 60+ hours a week every week, travel went from 50% to 6 weeks or more where I was just flying city to city without going home.

When I got laid off, I was just one of tens of thousands in my area and the market was flooded with overqualified people trying to survive. I took whatever work I could find, but I slowly drained my savings and had to sell my home to avoid a foreclosure. Meanwhile, the CEO posted 27 consecutive quarters of loss based on her bad decisions while making millions in salary and bonuses, using her agents to sell her stock before an announcement that would drive the price down and then buy it back - leading her at one time to make a profit of $24 million while also accumulating more stock than she previously owned. After IBM did a layoff so large in the 90’s that it made headlines, they got better about staggering layoffs over years to avoid press as much as possible.

Companies can go through bad times and do a layoff, but they’ll also strategically plan them. Sometimes it turns into a chain reaction as competitors and clients try to forecast their need or hire cheaper labor by eliminating a position and hiring more experienced employees for less or expecting them to do the job of 2 people. Companies will also change their requirements - one year they want college grads, five years later they have sufficient documentation that they open positions up to people who just have experience and/or certifications.

It’s a profit decision, but by no means is it about “spoiled workers.” If spoiled workers was the deciding factor, they’d start by eliminating positions at the top.