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Why Copycat Layoffs Won't Help Tech Companies, or Their Employees
An 8-minute interview arguing that tech layoffs spread by imitation and often disappoint
Why it’s worth your time
Layoff headlines have a way of making every job feel shaky at once. In this short Stanford interview, Jeffrey Pfeffer, who has studied hiring and firing for decades, argues that the 2022 wave of tech cuts had more to do with companies copying each other than with their own results. It's one researcher's strong view, and it can help you read the news as information about an industry rather than a verdict on you.
How to think about layoffs in your industry
The essay · 8 min · Free
How to get it
Opens their site. We don’t copy it here; we’d rather they get the read.
- Read the interview.
It's a short Q&A. His answers on why companies follow each other, and on what layoffs tend not to fix, carry the argument. His one piece of advice for people who've been laid off comes near the end.
- Sort what you know from what you're reading.
Write three lines: how your company is doing on its own numbers, how your team's work connects to what leadership says matters this year, and what you'd want ready if things changed. A blank line is the next thing to find out.
Good moments for this: when layoff news is everywherebefore a company all-handswhen weighing a job offer
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
Pfeffer's point is that cuts can spread whatever a company's results, so headlines are a weak guide in either direction. What leaders say about your company's revenue, plans and hiring tends to be the better signal.
What might make this harder
Pfeffer's advice is to check that your next employer, if it calls people its most important asset, actually behaved that way when times were hard. How a team handled its last downturn is a fair interview question.
Questions people ask
What is social contagion in layoffs?
The idea Pfeffer uses to explain the 2022 tech cuts: behavior spreading through a network of companies as firms copy what others are doing.
Do layoffs save companies money?
Pfeffer argues they often don't, pointing to severance, laid-off staff rehired as contractors, lower morale and the cost of hiring again when the economy turns.
Are layoffs bad for the people who stay?
Pfeffer says they raise stress for those who remain and for the managers doing the cutting.
What it says, and how it holds up
When layoffs hit company after company, it's natural to scan your own job for signs. This December 2022 interview, conducted by Melissa De Witte for Stanford News, offers a different lens. Jeffrey Pfeffer, a Stanford professor of organizational behavior and the author of Dying for a Paycheck, argues that the tech cuts weren't mainly driven by each company's own situation. In his view, companies were cutting largely because other companies were.
He's blunt about the results. In his telling, layoffs don't solve the problems that usually sit underneath them, such as a weak strategy, lost market share or too little revenue, and he cites research linking job loss to serious harm to people's health. These are his summaries of research in an interview, not the studies themselves, so treat the figures he quotes as his reading. He also points to companies that took other routes, from Southwest Airlines after September 11 to SAS, which hired during downturns, and Lincoln Electric, which spread a pay cut across its staff instead of cutting people.
It's offered with no one pushing back, and he doesn't hedge. Ben Horowitz, writing from the CEO's chair about three rounds of layoffs at his own company, starts from the opposite assumption, that some cuts can't be avoided when a company badly misses its plan, and focuses on doing them decently, with managers telling their own people that the company failed, not them. On that last point the two land close together, for different reasons: a layoff tends to say more about the company, or the companies around it, than about any one person's work.
A cancelled project or slipping reviews is a different worry: the industry story doesn't apply there, and a plain read on how your work is landing tends to tell you more. The interview explains how layoffs tend to spread; it isn't legal or financial advice.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.