There is so much to unpack from this post.

1. Post Dot-com bubble dev naivete: most Post Dot-com devs (ie those who joined the work force sometime after the bubble burst) have only known the summer of tech (ML flourishing, everyone can code movements, nonsensical startups raising ridiculous amounts of money, companies hiring devs they don't need to keep competitors from having and BigHead kind of devs able to keep a job). These are the devs that used to go to r/cscareerquestions and tell everyone that they should get everyone to learn to code and program, the kind that believed in chasing aggressive salary growth at any cost. True summertime devs who have known nothing but joy and love in the tech world. These are the devs who OD'ed on the tech corpo koolaid

2. The super-meritocracy fallacy: following from point 1, these devs believed in the increasingly rare concept of promotion-only growth, the idea that if you worked really hard, your salary and your job title willl eventually reflect your hard work. While this is somewhat true, the extent to which your hard work is actually compensated seems to be overrated by most devs. This a rather peculiar thing as you would expect most devs to be data driven and to actually research whether this is true in general for most companies. Any veteran knows that career progression and salary increase by promotion has a very early point of diminished returns hence the job-hopping

3. The existential meaning of a job: this is another peculiar aspect of devs given that they see themselves as rational. An employeement relationship is a business relationship (like a partnership) where continuous work is exchanged for money. Yet these devs seem to have somehow assume some kind of existential meaning to this transactional relationship the terms of which they should have known. Placing the meaning of your life in a transaction is clearly misguided and it shouldn't take a layoff for someone to realise that. Yet here we are

4. The Saviour Dev Hero myth: this also follows from point 1. Devs being marketed as corpo heros is just that marketing. The supply and demand ratio is not a fixed thing. It changes. Devs were never going to be in demand forever. Business needs change. No one is irreplaceable. No matter how good. There is always someone good enough that will work for a similar salary (or less). During the summer of tech, the demand was higher than the supply so layoffs were rare. But summers don't last forever.

Ultimately, the lesson that devs, for all their self-described higher intellect and rationality, never seem to learn is that the goal of all companies is to increase their profits, everything else is secondary. Other goals exist only to help that. Layoffs while declaring record breaking profits is not surprising. Given the job market, new hires could be acquired at a lower salary and perhaps not as many are needed. As an employee, you are there to help increase profits and the company owes you a salary. This implied idea that efforts should be rewarded even when it makes no business sense, that the company should provide an existential meaning to your work or that it should always need you even when it makes no business sense is in my opinion delusional and a by-product of Post-Dot bubble conditions that no longer exist.

The market has changed (and it will change again) and all agents within must do so as well.