Wait let me guess, the CEO is taking full responsibility but with no actual consequences?
"We will work harder"
"Challenges were encountered"
"Building a Stronger Company"
"Amazing/incredible journey"
"No way reflect"
"Local laws"
E.g. if Microsoft decided to sunset its incredible GitHub journey, it would probably find itself with too many web developers. If it got out of Xboxes, too many embedded. If it went full remote, too many office managers and IT.
Occam's Razor says: or the companies just want to rehire new people at lower pay.
And what you say simply isn't true anyway - I even studied EE, but all my professional experience is on the web, I would have a long ramp up to be productive on an embedded team. I probably shouldn't even be hired for a grad position on such a team, a fresh graduate would have better memory of domain-specific stuff.
What Occam's razor actually says is that in the face of multiple possible explanations, the simpler one is the more likely one. Your suggested explanation seems a more complicated conspiracy than simply not needing/being able to afford people to me.
Do you have any idea how much it costs to recruit replacement developers? Between the cost for recruiters, the amount of time spent on interviews, and ramp-up time for new hires, you'd need to lower wages by a significant amount (eg. 30%) for you to be able to get payback in a reasonable amount of time. Not to mention, if you're a startup, the loss of institutional knowledge will greatly hamper your ability to execute.
Given that redundancy is a more complicated legal process it’s unlikely you’d use it for this purpose.
This was widely considered to be fire and rehire, although the government position was that it was “just fire”. So companies are willing to skirt the intention of the law.
The size of company doesn't matter to the point anyway - I used Microsoft as a well-known example so I could say 'imagine if they stopped doing GitHub' et al. I can't do that if I pick some random small start-up that I'm familiar with. (Maybe I could have said 'if Notion went all-in on AI' or something? But I wouldn't have had multiple examples.)
If you don't like that then consider pushing for unions, government regulations or join an employee co-op. However many people don't like that option because they prefer to not risk the massive compensation packages that big tech gives them.
I'm reminded of the Street Fighter quote:
"For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me... it was Tuesday."
A lot of these layoffs will be net negatives for the companies.
Further in Google’s case they have plenty of money to pay these people until headcount naturally shrinks, but they don’t have anything useful enough for them to do that waiting and avoiding a large severance package is cheaper.
it sounds like greed, not incompetence.
I just do not believe in a worldview where almost all CEOs of large tech companies are incompetent. Whatever the explanation for layoffs is, incompetence ain't it.
More than once inferior products and services get investor money and good ones fail to receive any funding.