Comment by keeda

Even if we're being charitable and assuming it's group-think, it is still a form of collusion. The group of competitors collectively decides on specific outcomes that are beneficial to the group as a whole even if they know that the individual outcomes are sub-optimal.

Look at the evidence: Most of these companies had been highly and ever-increasingly profitable even before the layoffs, and they knew they were burning employee goodwill. Are you saying their actions haven't been coordinated and just accidentally happened to all follow the same practices at the same time? Including things like RTO, which their own internal data proves does not improve productivity and industry data actually shows increases attrition?

Sure, there's not been a written industry-wide memo laying out a playbook (that we know of), but everyone is following the same steps. And you would assume there is no secrecy, rather than (as sibling comments point out) "they have learned from the last time they got caught colluding"?

That's more charitable than I would be ¯\_(ツ)_/¯