Emily Flippen

Well, I'm just feeling shocked that Meta is still claiming to have a culture after all of these years of the number of directions that Zuckerberg has taken that company.

I'm shocked that anybody at the company still feels like there's a cohesive culture.

So I understand the complaints there, but there's no doubt that layoffs, of course, reduce morale across the board.

Nobody likes to see their friends, their co-workers leave the company.

Nobody likes to feel like their own livelihood is threatened.

But what I think is really interesting about this dynamic is that

To your point, this is really only a recent development, the idea of layoffs being cheered.

I mean, prior to like 2022, the market really didn't like layoffs.

I mean, it usually meant a slower economy, less people employed.

But after this pandemic, the narrative has really shifted.

I think the narrative has become layoffs do stuff like lower inflation, which, of course, everybody is concerned about.

They also boost earnings even temporarily for a company.

And that's all coming after what many perceive to be

over hiring that took place during and post pandemic throughout 2020 to 2021.

There's actually been some research about this that I think is really interesting and reactions do of course, and should, I mean, significantly change from company to company, but on average layoff announcements do tend to be followed

by poor stock returns for the companies that announced layoffs.

And I think that, yes, culture has a part to do with that, Travis.

But it might be interestingly enough just that layoffs actually really produce less cost savings than a lot of people assume.

So you have the moment of being like, oh, maybe we're going to see a bump in EPS next quarter.

But then it's followed by months and years of bad feelings.