The question is: Why have many of the most profitable companies of our generation — most of which are still very much profitable — announced staggering rounds of layoffs, one after the other? And why now?As tech giants lay off scores of workers amid a sector-wide downturn, employees who once considered the Silicon Valley companies a safe long-term bet are reconsidering their allegiances. “The nice comp and all the perks,” Beatty said, “none of them are really beneficial if you’re always worrying, ‘Well, am I going to be the next to be arbitrarily let go?’ ”The clinical cruelty through which some of the layoffs were administered often served to underline that point — Google employees showing up to work to find that their keycards had been deactivated, workers locked out of email accounts and not allowed to enter the offices again, not even to say goodbye to colleagues they had worked with for years. “There are people with visas or parental leave, they’re saying, ‘How do I navigate this now?’ I was compiling some of these questions to pass along, and one guy who was here on a visa said, ‘Can you ask them how long until I get deported?’ ”Above all, workers like Beatty and Hinnant say it’s spurring interest in further tech worker organizing