Microsoft to lay off 11k employees

> The company had 221,000 full-time employees, including 122,000 in the United States and 99,000 internationally, as of June 30, according to filings.

The size of these organizations always catch me off guard. 11,000 is a huge number but 221,000 is even more staggering!

I'm wondering what data really drives the back-and-forth at big tech. We've seen google, amazon, microsoft, meta, etc.. do hiring freezes, then layoffs. Hiring freeze, then back open, or layoffs then more layoffs later.

I would expect a longer term plan than just looking forward or backwards one quarter which seems like what has been happening the last year. I would assume they had better information and insights than common investors, but the activity out of these companies in relation to hiring and layoffs has seemed to be as sudden as people changing their stock allocations.

Apple seems far more stable.

It seems like they are just taking advantage of the climate. All of these companies are going to be "trimming the fat" while the news cycle is used to this category of headline.

Does Microsoft still do stack rank layoffs every year?