They could've just let those employees go, but they are giving them time to find a new role (and paying them the whole time they're not working).
Disclaimer: Am a Google employee.
Btw, the "finding a new role" is easily within Google. One of the "cloud" teams that was defragged was in my office, and some of those people were people I've worked with over the years. Local management are trying to make sure they have places to land on other teams in the office.
Yes, they can look for new jobs externally, but this is how Google deals with cleaning up teams from time-to-time. Luckily Google is still hiring, and people moving to new teams tends to work out without much fuss.
Outside Google, I've seen the same behavior. A friend that worked at waffle.io got a similar 3-6 month transition window (find a new job internally or externally). They ended up staying at Broadcom, so it's a good way for companies to retain talent in a tight labor market.
The next logical step is to hire fire people until you reach the optimal number, in some kind of binary search approach.
At my company there are a lot of people talking about work, doing planning, scheduling and whatever. They don’t contribute much but also hold the engineers up with constant information requests.
At this point product managers fight for their ideas to be implemented so that they can get promoted, even if it's an inferiour solution.
This article is far too credulous and feels like it was planted by a Google marketing person worried about customers being scared off by the downsizing news and by Google's culture of whimsical product creation/destruction in general.
Sure. That's why we see so many blog links on HN with titles like "I scaled my startup from $0 to $883 million with no employees in six days and only spent 49¢."