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I suspect with ZIRP on the way out we'll see more tech companies tightening their belts. The reality of it is that most tech companies are horribly over staffed (look at Twitter, where allegedly 80% of the employees were let go, with no ensuing technical disaster that was, nonetheless, oft predicted.) There have always been theories floating around as to why these companies become so bloated with dead weight employees: FAANG hires anyone remotely competent and gives them make-work to keep them from their competitors, was a common belief.
I think the reality is a bit more nuanced than that and less strategic: headcounts bloat because when you're already making good money, the easiest way to increase your status is to increase the number of people "working under you". So projects which could reasonably be handled by one "10x developer" get spun out into entire teams to make the lead look better. And his boss is happier because now he is responsible for more people, which makes him look even more important, and so on. With fat enough margins (and/or a zero interest rate environment) this process can continue for a very long time. It's how a firm like Dropbox winds up with over 3000 employees.
I work on boring tax software for a megacorp, and our software development velocity would actually improve if we fired our entire offshore team (based in India). We would need a small transition period (due to them apparently intentionally siloing important information) but currently they cause more issues than they fix. As a small example, one of the third party tax accounting softwares that we integrate added a new authentication method in late 2022 or early 2023, I can't recall. I spent an hour or so to add support for it to the API client wrapper that I maintain (that gets used by all of our products for integration with this third party software). The only changes required on the part of the other products using my wrapper is a ~5 line code change, a new column in the database to track if customers are using the new or old authentication method, and updating an existing form (where users enter their API credentials) to allow users to choose the type of authentication they want to use. The data required by the new auth method is actually a subset of the data required by the old method, so the form needs hardly any modifications.
In spite of this, my offshore coworkers have spent almost a year and a half having regular meetings about implementing these changes, planning, "technical discussions," etc. And I've had to attend the vast majority of them, wasting mountains of my time. Oh and I'm not allowed to implement these changes myself in the 30 minutes or so it would take to do them, they're very protective of the things they work on and actively inhibit and block anyone who tries to improve their shitty code. And they refuse to read the documentation that I've written.
So basically my offshore coworkers have wasted 10+ hours of my time over something that should have taken a single dev 30 minutes (plus a change request to our DB admins I guess). And this for over a year and a half now.
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