Wow, some serious high level employees here. Nobody is safe.
If you are making money and not a cost center for your company, you are likely safe during times of economic turmoil. Being on profitable and important to core business teams is great during any time. I remember a team I was on which was responsible for a large amount of yearly revenue. You can imagine we never got questioned about team lunches or miscellaneous snack and drink reimbursements even though there was a company policy to instill frugality. When times are good, times are good. When times are tough, you want to be a money maker.
It's weird to me that these companies, all of them, still very much flush with cash, have now engineered this an environment of FUD in everyone's mind. For creativity to thrive and ideas to launch during the next boom, you need an environment of safety. Tech had always been been synonymous with optimism.
It feels exactly the same at Google. It's certainly true that some job functions were hit harder than others, and some orgs were hit harder than others, but certainly no one was guaranteed to be safe merely from working on an "important" product.
Excess perks, I don't care about. I can buy my own drinks and coffee. But a company that isn't taking bigger and bigger risks is a company that is at risk and just ignoring it.
An interesting question then follows: are those companies where you can take larger and larger risks without adversely affecting people, actually adding anything of real value? Or is it all broken window fallacy?
This is not to say that e.g. Google is a useless company. Surely its products have provided a lot of benefit from people. But it is also clear that taking risks as Google can cause clear negative consequences for people. So the question is more for a hypothetical company that can take arbitrarily large risks.
Taking risks is working on new products to expand the company. Possibly refined versions of existing products, possibly explorations of related offerings. Could be green field recreation of what you have to see if you can make it better. Could be isolated improvements.
Such that, if you think it is only risky to possibly harm someone... I don't think we are talking about the same things.
I've been lucky to work in consumer facing engineering that isn't soul sucking. In fact, it's market segments that I find interesting as a consumer too. I still optimize this way because I'm in a place in life where I want stability when my head hits then pillow in my home that I have a mortgage on. I have a family and stability yields solace and solace yields clarity of mind which allows me to be a better employee. It really is a virtuous cycle.
For example, companies would choose cheaper employees for the same output, if possible, even if they are responsible for a lot of revenue.
For the last decade Google, Meta, et.al. have been sucking the power out of innovative ideas and mostly killing them off if they didn't deliver at the scale they operated at.
It’s actually one of the reasons economists point to the US economy being much more vibrant than in Europe for example.
If they just got rid of the very high level (read: expensive) employees, they would likely be older - which can lead to age discrimination suits. If they just got rid of really junior people because they're so junior that they aren't that valuable yet, that's also a potential age discrimination suit. So they spread out the seniority (and ages).
Lots of other Director-level and below were let go, as well. Impacts to IC-level employees was minimal in the engineering organization but common in other departments, e.g. product and marketing.
At least these higher-ups are gonna be OK, as they were making obscene amounts of money ($1M+/yr) and have all been in the industry for awhile, thus are well-situated financially. Every single one of them I know owns at least one home and routinely does all sorts of expensive traveling. Contrast that with laying off someone earlier in their career for whom a layoff might actually impose real financial hardships.
That said, as you correctly point out, obscene is the word of the day. I worked with these people for nearly 10 years, I know entirely too much about their personal histories and lives. They're each multi-millionaires, they're each fully capable of retirement today... Or, hell, many years ago, for that matter. They're going to be just fine once their bruised egos heal.
That's the funny thing. I was talking to one of them who I know for a fact is very well off, and he was saying he kind of wished that he had been laid off, as it would've been a huge payout (because of tenure) that would've allowed him to not need to find another job for almost a full year, which he'd do at a leisurely pace.
In my mind I'm thinking, you'd still want to work?! Dude, you're loaded, you're over 50, why not just retire if that happened?? But maybe he wouldn't know what to do with himself. I'm not nearly at conventional retirement age yet, but despite having enough money to be financially independent already, I'm not considering retirement, as I too wouldn't know what to do with myself.
Makes sense when managers are hired from within and retain the ability to do the job of the people they were managing. And 10000000% makes sense from a peter principle point of view: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
Definitely does not work when managers are parachuted in from elsewhere or in a fungible "a manager is a manager and can manage any team". That happens in government a lot.