Having a shortage of people is as debilitating as having too many people. Not only is a company not able to fulfill their goals for business development, but they also can't sustain their existing responsibilities and existing customer base. People were switching jobs left and right, and inspired a desire to retain people instead of adding people on demand, in the same way as the supply chain caused people to stock up on chips resulting in today's oversupply of chips.
In 2020, companies were envisioning that the way we worked was so drastically different from how it really turned out, surprisingly similar to before. That meant a lot more investment in new markets that would need a lot more services and goods (ex. remote work meant a lot of work for people to develop homes more, allow more to be done fully virtually, move many services originally in cities to suburbs). When things didn't turn out that way, and people started to get back to normal, projects that would have had a huge return if realized and need more people working suddenly different. Then it was a game of chicken of how to admit that they invested in the wrong efforts because things didn't turn out how they had expected.
In 2020, companies were envisioning that the way we worked was so drastically different from how it really turned out, surprisingly similar to before. That meant a lot more investment in new markets that would need a lot more services and goods (ex. remote work meant a lot of work for people to develop homes more, allow more to be done fully virtually, move many services originally in cities to suburbs). When things didn't turn out that way, and people started to get back to normal, projects that would have had a huge return if realized and need more people working suddenly different. Then it was a game of chicken of how to admit that they invested in the wrong efforts because things didn't turn out how they had expected.