Personal Weblog of Deepak Vasudevan

When LinkedIn Made Me Practice What I Was Preaching Against I just wrote a post about the "Ambujam Effect"—how companies mimic each other's layoffs not out of necessity, but performance. How executives cut jobs to signal efficiency to Wall Street, even while posting record profits. Then LinkedIn told me my post was 1,018 characters too long. The First Round of Cuts I had to decide: Which sentences were "essential"? Which examples could I afford to lose? Which explanatory phrases were just "nice to have"? I made the cuts. Painful, but necessary to meet the platform's arbitrary limit. The Second Round Then LinkedIn came back: "Still 18 characters over the limit." Eighteen characters. Not a paragraph. Not even a full sentence. Just... a bit more efficiency needed. The Irony Wasn't Lost Here I was, writing about how layoffs are often driven by arbitrary metrics rather than genuine need—and I was being forced to enact t...

The 'Ambujam Effect': Why Corporate Layoffs Are Less About Need and More About Imitation and Drama When one major tech company announces layoffs, a strange inevitability sets in. Soon after, another, and then another, follows suit—often without a visible, corresponding collapse in their own financial reports. It's a phenomenon perfectly captured by the Tamil lyric: "Aduthaathu Ambujatha Paarthelala Ava Aathukarar Konjurarathe Kettala..." (roughly: Did you see what Ambujam’s neighbor did? Did you hear what her husband bought?). It's the competitive, consumerist urge to mimic one's peers, but in the corporate world, the item being copied is a mass workforce reduction. This is the Layoff Contagion, and it proves that the current wave of cuts is less about solvency and more about herd mentality and financial performance art. 1. The Contagion: Why the Herd Moves Together The idea that thousands of companies independently realize they need the exact same cut...