Games

It's not rational, it's virtue signalling for the owning class. It's saying "we are pious believers in the neoliberal order and we are happy to treat our employees like shit".

It's a mix of that, but also they have to make good on all these "AI investments" that "boost productivity" and allow employees to do more. I'm a principal engineer so it was part of my job to assess how much these tools actually boost productivity and they don't at all. They change where the mental power goes, but it's not really faster and is more mistake prone. If I had to make a comparison, it's a bit like a concorde plane, it's technically faster airspeed, but then you spend all your time trying to make a thing that can shove air out of the way faster than it wants to move (supersonic) and that's just a lot more effort in other areas. Notice concord planes are nowhere to be seen despite existing for decades and being objectively faster. Not worth, but in the AI craze who cares.

They also took advantage of taxpayer funds to boost their profits during the pandemic, and that money is gone now, so if you aren't cutting a big part of your staff, either you didn't take advantage of the pandemic, or you did and you have dead weight. It's important to note that most big tech companies made record profits during that time.

If you were a tech company and you weren't killing off a chunk of your staff, it was a signal something was wrong with your business in some way. It's entirely a speculative stock market thing, which is all that matters these days. They can invent other reasons why they aren't meeting targets.

TLDR; those losses are on another spreadsheet