So much of Silicon Valley’s “productivity” (beyond stock prices) for the past several years seems to come from highly paid workers rearranging drop-down menus and relocating a check-box from one side of a web page to the other, refreshing a design or color scheme — in other words, window dressing. Gobs of people justifying their existence, but not really their salaries. So it’s not surprising there would be so much “bloat” in the system, and rather easy to cut jobs without raising the ire of users/consumers (many of whom don’t actually appreciate the constant tweaking and needless redesigns). But a closer look at this particular round of layoffs, with so many companies reporting layoffs in such similar numbers, reveals that the most likely explanation for them is a copy-cat motif, in which stock prices get artificially juiced by the announcement of the plan, rather than any significant change in the companies’ fundamentals. In other words, smoke and mirrors for short-term gain. But to the article’s point: It’s a harsh wake-up call for GenZ & younger Millennials. The rest of us have already been similarly burned by what motivates the C-Suite: greed greed greed. Our eCONomy is a shell game in which most of us lose big at some point, and few of us ever fully rebound. That’s what happens when shareholder profit is the guiding principle. And it’s why we are in the midst of another Mass Extinction. We need to learn how to serve one another rather than how to profit.

So much of Silicon Valley’s “productivity” (beyond stock prices) for the past several years seems to come from highly paid workers rearranging drop-down menus and relocating a check-box from one side of a web page to the other, refreshing a design or color scheme — in other words, window dressing. Gobs of people justifying their existence, but not really their salaries. So it’s not surprising there would be so much “bloat” in the system, and rather easy to cut jobs without raising the ire of users/consumers (many of whom don’t actually appreciate the constant tweaking and needless redesigns). But a closer look at this particular round of layoffs, with so many companies reporting layoffs in such similar numbers, reveals that the most likely explanation for them is a copy-cat motif, in which stock prices get artificially juiced by the announcement of the plan, rather than any significant change in the companies’ fundamentals. In other words, smoke and mirrors for short-term gain. But to the article’s point: It’s a harsh wake-up call for GenZ & younger Millennials. The rest of us have already been similarly burned by what motivates the C-Suite: greed greed greed. Our eCONomy is a shell game in which most of us lose big at some point, and few of us ever fully rebound. That’s what happens when shareholder profit is the guiding principle. And it’s why we are in the midst of another Mass Extinction. We need to learn how to serve one another rather than how to profit.

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