Does anyone else remember all those "Day in the Life" vlogs/videos/social media posts that were getting created and shared around a few months back? If you don't know what I'm talking about, a quick search will net you a bunch of these. "Tech" employees from LinkedIn, Google, and many other tech companies were sharing what they did in a given day and it was hilarious. Most of the people posting these were generally not "tech" strictly speaking (i.e. not coders, architects, server admins, etc.). They were tech-adjacent people: Analysts (super vague job title), scrum masters, social media strategists, supervisors, etc. All the people who kind of help tech people with the things that are not explicitly tech like meetings, working with the business side of the organization, reporting, etc. You didn't see a lot of back-end developers or automation engineers posting these things.
And boy, these vloggers got dragged all over the place online because their "work days" consisted of things like taking advantage of the ridiculous freebies and frills of their company (nap rooms, abundant free snacks, swag, Google dogs they could pet, etc.) and not really doing a lot of actual work. It made tech companies look like adult daycare rather than workplaces.
So it comes as no surprise to me that thousands of "tech" employees got laid off. I'm sure actual hard workers were impacted and actual developers too, but I have a hunch that the majority was fat just waiting to be trimmed. Now that the news of these layoffs is making headlines, those social media posts are circulating again as if to say "this might be why you were axed." I feel bad for all those who lost their jobs because that sucks, but I think it was necessary from the company's standpoint. Those companies should not have been hiring like they did or creating workplaces filled with non-work.