I heard a story the other day from one of the game developers that got laid off recently.

It wasn't that they'd lost their job that upset them the most. It was the fact that the project they'd spent years working on got cancelled and it felt like all those nights and weekends working overtime, missing out on time with their family had gone to waste.

On the other hand, these layoffs are most likely because the company took out a lot of debt and now they can't afford it at the higher interest rates. So when you think about it, it's not so much at the whim of someone else, but simply people acting rationally in their own self interest. Trace it back far enough and it's remarkable how many times it comes back to centrally planned government decisions.