You know, using absolute numbers to talk about layoffs is unhelpful, and extrapolating trends from them makes for bad, possibly harmful analysis. I get that big numbers draw eyeballs, but still.
The next best alternative is to express it in terms of a % of total employees. Better yet would be to compare the # of employees over time (possibly expressed as a proportion of some business metric such as revenue). Is this just a reversion to the mean? And is such reversion because they over-hired or because their revenue growth has meaningfully slowed?
But real useful insight would also require comparing this to other companies, including smaller ones. Just as bad as, or possibly worse than, Accenture cutting 19,000 jobs—some single digit percentage of its employees—would be to have thousands of companies cut, say, 20% of their staff.
There's a lot of availability bias in just plotting absolute layoff numbers from Big Tech and other large cap businesses.
The next best alternative is to express it in terms of a % of total employees. Better yet would be to compare the # of employees over time (possibly expressed as a proportion of some business metric such as revenue). Is this just a reversion to the mean? And is such reversion because they over-hired or because their revenue growth has meaningfully slowed?
But real useful insight would also require comparing this to other companies, including smaller ones. Just as bad as, or possibly worse than, Accenture cutting 19,000 jobs—some single digit percentage of its employees—would be to have thousands of companies cut, say, 20% of their staff.
There's a lot of availability bias in just plotting absolute layoff numbers from Big Tech and other large cap businesses.