13 percent

Why are so many companies laying off exactly this many workers? Also, 7 other things worth knowing today.

I don't like writing about layoffs; not for the subject in general, and not for the people affected.

But in the latest rounds of layoffs at big tech companies across, a single, odd, specific thing keeps coming up over and over and over. It's that one company after another seems to lay off almost the exact same percentage of its workforce: 13 percent, give or take a point.

• Meta, Facebook's parent company, is laying off 11,000 workers, which works out to 13 percent of its workforce.

• Redfin, the online real estate company that got into home-flipping for a while, is laying off 862 positions. Again, that's 13 percent.

• I wrote about Stripe's layoffs recently; while the CEO's message was about as nice as a layoff notice could be, it wasn't enough to save 1,120 jobs, or else 14 percent of the workforce. 

We can keep going down the line:

• Lyft: about 700 employees, or 13% of its workforce. 

• Chime: 160 workers, which is about 12%. 

• GoFundMe: 94 employees, which means about 12%. 

• Peloton: another 500 empl…