Much has been made recently of the apparent disparity between layoffs in the tech sector and some of the most robust labor market data in US history.

Job cuts are piling up at a veritable who’s who of tech firms. At this point, I’ve personally lost count, but suffice to say at least 100,000 people have been impacted by the decisions, which, generally speaking, were the result of over-hiring during the pandemic.

It was tempting to extrapolate COVID-related trends, which is precisely what tech executives did. Some of those executives have lived through downturns in their careers, but others haven’t, and it’s safe to say nobody currently occupying a C-suite seat was in a position of corporate authority during the Spanish flu. So, even for executives with experience navigating choppy waters, the last few years presented a unique challenge.

Given all of that, it’s hardly surprising that many firms are angling to make 2023 a “year of efficiency,” as Mark Zuckerberg put it last week. On Monday, Dell cited “an uncertain future” for 6,650 planned cuts, becoming the latest tech firm to announce a meaningful headcount reduction.

So, what to make of “lean tech,” as it were, in an environment when seemingly every other employer in the country can’t find enough workers? In a new note on the subject, Goldman’s Ronnie Walker posed a few more specific questions. “Are [tech layoffs] an indication that while there is still plenty of demand for workers in a few industries, the labor market is much weaker in other industries, especially higher-paying ones?” he wondered. “Or an early warning sign about deteriorating demand at some companies that could soon spread to others too?”

Not to ruin the suspense, but Goldman isn’t particularly concerned about the broader labor market. Companies announcing layoffs have two additional things in common besides being associated, loosely or otherwise, with technology.

First, most of these companies hired at a torrid pace over the pandemic period. In fact, headcount is, on average, more than 40% higher compared to levels witnessed on the eve of the pandemic. That makes for a stark juxtaposition with the overall economy, where payrolls are a mere 2% higher.

As Walker put it, some of these companies simply “over-extrapolat[ed] pandemic-related trends that ultimately proved more fleeting than expected.”

In addition, it’s entirely likely that these layoffs are partly attributable to plunging stock prices and associated consternation among investors. As the chart shows, public companies announcing layoffs witnessed a -40% drop in their share price from the peak, on average, compared to just -14% for the S&P 500.

Of course, the gratuitous bloodletting in tech shares owes a lot to the impact of higher rates on growth stocks, which had the most to lose in a scenario where sharply higher real yields resulted in multiple compression.

So, what do you do in that situation? You can blame the Fed, but that’s not necessarily going to placate shareholders. Cutting costs, on the other hand, can do wonders to allay investor concerns. Just ask Zuckerberg, who enjoyed a one-day $12.5 billion paper gain last week when Meta’s pretensions to cost discipline (never mind the sea of red in Reality Labs) triggered a mind-bending stock surge.

“This could mean that some of the announced layoffs were more an effort to improve company valuations by responding to investor demands to shrink workforces that were perceived to have grown too large and expensive, rather than a signal that the demand outlook had worsened,” Goldman went on to suggest.

Yes, I’d say that’s probably accurate. On Meta’s call last week, Zuckerberg and Susan Li reiterated that the 11,000 jobs Meta eliminated in November were “just the beginning” of the company’s “efficiency efforts.” That doesn’t have to mean more job cuts, of course. And hopefully it won’t. But when the stock’s down nearly 75%, as Meta’s was at one point, you do what you gotta do, I suppose.

The (sad) punchline is that once the AI learns to engineer itself, all tech workers may be rendered more or less redundant. Even, perhaps, the CEOs.

On Tuesday afternoon, Zoom said it’s laying off 1,300 workers, or around 15% of its workforce. “I know this is a difficult message to hear, and certainly not one I ever wanted to deliver,” CEO Eric Yuan told “Zoomies,” whose sacrifice, a letter promised, “will not [be] in vain.” Zoom’s shares fell nearly 90% from their pandemic highs to the lows in December.