I don’t know who needs to hear this but companies sometimes announce layoffs, or do mass layoffs, or even financially unwise offshoring or whatever, just to send a “signal” to the stock market, because they’ve all been trained that Wall Street loves a company that’s slashed a bunch of jobs. There are other corporate tricks and tax maneuvering and whatnot that goes on that explains things that look inscrutable from the outside. So business decisions are often not based on anything that would make logical sense to the public at large. And you can’t necessarily trust it as an indicator of anything at all on its own anyway. You always have to take things in context, and look at a variety of indicators. That said, there’s really no indicators that are saying things are great, and things weren’t even going great for the average person even when the indicators were indicating things were doing well. So I don’t know, just give up on tea leaves, or magic 8 balls, and especially avoid The Oracle of Chatbot.
TECHSPOT – How a little-known tax change sparked a tech layoff surge New R&D tax rules upended the tech sector By Skye Jacobs June 10, 2025 at 7:03 AM This adjustment, designed as a political maneuver to make the tax bill appear fiscally balanced, was largely unknown outside tax and accounting circles until its real-world consequences became impossible to ignore. The impact was immediate and severe. When companies filed their 2022 tax returns under the new rules, they found themselves unable to offset their R&D spending against taxable income fully. For cash-strapped firms and those not yet profitable, the result was a sudden and painful increase in tax bills, just as venture funding was drying up and borrowing costs were rising. The financial pressure forced companies to make tough decisions, and in many cases, the largest and most flexible expense – headcount – was the first to be reduced. Since the start of 2023, the tech industry has shed more than half a million jobs, with some of the biggest names in the industry making substantial cuts. Meta reduced its workforce by nearly a quarter, Microsoft trimmed about 7 percent, and Amazon, Alphabet, and Salesforce all eliminated thousands of positions, often in product development and engineering – the very teams most affected by the loss of immediate R&D deductions. Smaller firms, lacking the financial cushion of industry giants, faced even harsher realities.