Good to see a $2T market cap company doesn't have enough revenue to retrain and reassign these employees. I'd hate to think what the shareholders would have to endure had they not done layoffs.
However Google had 55,000 more employees in 2022 than it did in 2020, an increase of around 33%. It seems possible they actually didn't have enough for all these people to do.
The company could easily afford to have kept these people on. But if, as seems likely, these people are talented individuals with lots of potential,then keeping them in roles where there's no opportunity to be productive would have had downsides too. It still sucks to get made redundant though.
Google hired way too much during pandemic. From what I hear from G friends, this is likely a low performer prune.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/273744/number-of-full-ti...
They're explicitly letting go of high ranking staff in high wage metros. The talent and the institutional knowledge of some of those people makes the decision flabbergasting.
If you click over to the Python thread, you'll see that the victims include a member of the Python Steering Council and the maintainers of PyType. These aren't low-performers; they're people who are an integral part of the Python community.
From the pytype homepage:
> Thousands of projects at Google rely on pytype to keep their Python code well-typed and error-free.
How do you know those people still weren't low performers?