A lot of people here and in the industry in general seem to optimise for compensation package and put blinkers on themselves for other factors that are definitely relevant.
Companies aren't penalised by candidates for such practices. I'm not saying it's good but it's astounding to me the number of people who for example optimise entirely for salary and then are shocked when the working conditions are very poor.
People game companies and companies will game people in return. Murray Gell Man amnesia will kick in and next week there will be thread about how CloudFlare is a great place to work for software devs because you can earn 20% more than other comparable companies with no reference to how things like job security or working conditions are measured.
You now know which companies do this.
Every company laying off now has to wear a Scarlett Letter: "we're a layoffs company".
Either they will answer directly with something solid like "We're growing the team" or they will evade it which is still a meaningful answer for you. You could probe further with questions like:
"How has the team's headcount changed over the last 18-24 months?"
Basically you're alluding to 'employee turnover' without saying it.
That's not how that works... Please stop being delusional
LLM models have better reasoning abilities than these folks....
If that's the rule in your organization, and you have a core group of people that actually know the systems and get the work done, you better make sure you have 10% padding every year, lest you layoff someone important and their friends all quit in disgust. And since competence and institutional knowledge is built over time, that implies a revolving door of new folks coming in and most of it not making it.