How much does it cost to find and hire a Google-tier worker? Many hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you're talking about financial duty surely their duty is to retain the elite workers they've already got.
Someone who was hired 2 years ago with 500k of stock vesting over 4 years could have enough unvested stock leftover to fund two employees RSU grants...
Hiring google employees is still cheaper than keeping the senior ones.
If these employees are transitioning to wildly different roles within the company maybe the math changes a bit, but I'm not sure how much.
Edit: not to mention the trust erosion aspect. If I see people getting laid off cause their stock has appreciated, am I going to stay? Basically means stock appreciation is capped. People wouldn't take kindly to that.
I did. Google is so large the vast majority of engineers contain domain knowledge that is mainly just useful to their group. And if their group is undergoing layoffs, their domain knowledge isn’t too useful.
About the only useful things that a long-time googler will know when joining a new group over a noogler is the test infra and code review process.