I imagine, this is more about software devs than sysadmins. Sure, you’ll hire a couple more sysadmins to help with the massive user growth during the pandemic. But especially combined with loans basically being made free in the same time, it’s suddenly worth hiring a bunch of devs to build the Next Big Thing™.

Once those loans start costing again and the user numbers fall off, you quickly have lots of devs that you can’t find tasks for, that are worth doing.