I work for an educational tech company that boomed during lockdowns. Parents, teachers, schools, and entire districts started using our product to help manage assignments during at-home learning.

It was during this time that they got a bunch of VC funding, rapidly expanded management and the executive, and then began the process of tripling the head count of individual contributors while simultaneously laying off their entire school outreach and liason department.

Oh, and of course, they set new growth targets.

Then schools reopened, and business, understandably, rapidly declined.

Except no one in management seemed to understand why it was declining? And no one wanted to listen to any explanations that lay outside of the end product or the tech stack underpinning it.

And the best part was, if anyone ever raised the point that it seemed like management expected the company to perform the same after lockdowns as during, every single person would parrot the line "yeah, but all of the tech companies did, it wasn't just us".

They're all just jumping off cliffs because their friends are doing it, too.

I was literally told once that they were no longer hiring for the role I applied for because Facebook had slowed hiring and they were slowing hiring too in response.

The company I was applying to isn't even in the same industry as Facebook, other than both being tech companies.