The way these companies are run so cut-throat while also being worth a trillion dollars is such a fundamental systemic failure.

To say that it's because Microsoft overhired is a gross mis-remembering of the last 20 years.

For starters, I remember way back in the late 2000s meeting an engineer from the office team. Their entire job was focused on making buttons. Microsoft also used to employee engineers focused soley on testing software, though I've heard that has changed.

Anyway, this is a company with decades long cultural roots for enormously large teams where each person is hyper focused on tiny little pieces of a much larger product.

Also, let's not forget that they bought up 1/3 of the gaming industry.

I don't mind that Microsoft is hurting, because it makes mid products, that always seem to fail-up. However, I do mind that the people are okay that the answer is to lay people off instead of, maybe, breaking the company back up into smaller companies that preserve the stability of the workforce.