This will continue until there are actual consequences for those responsible.

I'm of the mindset that any time a company does layoffs, they should start from the top And work down.

Those lacking empathy don’t know how to not be cruel. They keep filtering to the top unfortunately. Something that remains to be solved for.

The business world changes direction faster than companies can adapt. That was my biggest lesson as an entrepreneur: entrepreneurs don't really pivot into product-market fit, the market pivots into them. The reason capitalism works is because there's this huge sea of dream-chasers out there, most of whom will go bankrupt, so that when the market's needs change there is somebody out there to service them, and everybody who's not effectively servicing them goes to hell and gets another job.

Corporations and management basically exist to buffer this uncertainty. Employment is actually a really bad deal in good economic times; owners reap almost all the windfall of having a successful product. But in bad times, the company keeps paying you even if they're losing money, at least up until they don't. You get a raw deal, but not as raw a deal as the people paying you.

Likewise with strategic direction. The market's needs change faster than senior executives can adapt: if they always produced what the market was actually clamoring for, the company would run around like a chicken with its head cut off (this actually happens when the CEO panics, and a key CEO skill, and part of the reason they're paid so much, is the ability to ignore every piece of market data saying "You're not hot anymore. Nobody wants you, and the market has moved on" and keep doing what you're doing even though your intuition is telling you that you're doomed and going to lose your cushy $20M/year job). Much of the job of middle management is to buffer senior management's freakouts and tell the ICs "Keep calm and carry on; let's see if he still cares about this new hotness next week."

The exuberance and self-assuredness that your plans are going to work out leads to overreach and I think the lag in accounting practices helps make that more acute.

I have had too many experiences where I thought my current employer was about to start circling the drain, and I've ended up some place that was circling faster. At a guess I'm about 50:50, which I suppose I should count as 'lucky' but has never felt that way.

Fish-tailing is a common flame-out mode for startups. VCs are partly to blame. They don't like to discourage you in case you come up with a miracle, but neither do they want to put good money and time after bad if it turns out you're going to be a break-even play or a loss.

The median position is to be hiring, just to backfill attrition. "Trouble" might be temporary; it might be noise. Hiring is always slow, with cycles longer than "trouble" might last.

We might argue about the parameters in this situation, but structurally there's a bias towards the low-pass average.

Its not even cruel. Its just dumb. Really dumb.

You are going to invest significant resources into hiring, onboarding, and injecting new staff into workflows for people that will not be there as soon as they are actually productive.

So its not just the cash burn - its the tieup of 3x team members to getting new people trained to become effective and successful contributor. Time is finite.

It makes no sense to throw away all that time spent by your team, who could have use that same time to get a few more features out, proposals sent , or projects spec'd instead.

If you believe you need more people to get out of trouble isn’t it cruel to not follow through?