lol.
Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors said that the current reduction in workforce at the company and across the industry is “something that everyone needs to get through,” later adding that the group’s strategy has been to cut the things that have “the lowest chance of success going forward” and to only keep “the most iconic studios.”
The tech industry is the ultimate sheep following sheep industry. Other tech companies laying people off? I better do it too! The Fear-Of-Looking-Stupid.
I was literally told once that they were no longer hiring for the role I applied for because Facebook had slowed hiring and they were slowing hiring too in response.
The company I was applying to isn’t even in the same industry as Facebook, other than both being tech companies.
I work for an educational tech company that boomed during lockdowns. Parents, teachers, schools, and entire districts started using our product to help manage assignments during at-home learning.
It was during this time that they got a bunch of VC funding, rapidly expanded management and the executive, and then began the process of tripling the head count of individual contributors while simultaneously laying off their entire school outreach and liason department.
Oh, and of course, they set new growth targets.
Then schools reopened, and business, understandably, rapidly declined.
Except no one in management seemed to understand why it was declining? And no one wanted to listen to any explanations that lay outside of the end product or the tech stack underpinning it.
And the best part was, if anyone ever raised the point that it seemed like management expected the company to perform the same after lockdowns as during, every single person would parrot the line “yeah, but all of the tech companies did, it wasn’t just us”.
They’re all just jumping off cliffs because their friends are doing it, too.
Had a very similar thing. Company I worked for had their best year by a long mile in 2020. Hired like crazy and talked big about all these deals in the pipeline with massive companies. Didn’t understand why deals started to fall through once lockdown ended, scrambled to try and fix things but just made themselves look directionless.
Ah yes. Lemmings