A layoff fundamentally changed how I perceive work

The thing that bothers me most about layoffs due to “financial difficulties” is when you observe management wasting absurd amounts of money on something in one year, then announcing the following year that they have to make cuts to baseline, “low level” employees that don’t cost much at all.

This kind of managerial behavior seriously kills employee motivation, because it both communicates that 1) no one has job security and 2) that management is apparently incapable of managing money responsibly.

“Sorry, we spent $200k on consultants and conferences that accomplished nothing, so now we have to cut an employee making $40k” really erodes morale in ways that merely firing people doesn’t.

Managers have a budget. They can't save it, and may spend big on consultants to create a buffer for their team when cuts hit. This is especially true in government, and big companies are similar.

There is only one person who really can stop cycles hitting budgets and that is the CEO. IIRC Warren Buffett lamented the fact that the CEO is more of an investor than a manager and that spending budgets as a senior manager gives them almost no experience in setting those budgets.

Conversely, budgets are based on estimates and forecast of resources needed. It's not like a manager gets a random number out of the blue and then needs to find ways to spend it. Budgets in engineering, especially software dev., are mostly based on number of people (aka 'resources') needed in the team, so a manager will want to fill their headcount otherwise it means they don't actually need this number of people.