You think their PR head would only spend 5 minutes crafting a post announcing the layoff of a quarter of their staff?

For a well trained and well paid one? Yeah, they probably have a template.

I wouldn't expect there to be a corporate template for a mass layoff press release. Having such a thing would be a warning sign for the future of the company to me.

Also, people who don't know anything about a task tend to underestimate its complexity. I can't remeber the name of the effect but it's a variant of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Mass layoffs are and have been standard procedures in any company, regardless of size. Writing such templates in good times instead of wasting resources elsewhere is just good risk management.

Whether you have a template or not, each mass layoff is going to be under specific circumstances, and is going to carry significant PR and HR consequences. It would be wise to take considerably longer than 5 minutes to consider and craft that message. I would agree that they could hammer out an initial draft for discussion with management in 5 minutes though.

Agreed on hyperbole and I could have used a more realistic example. My point was to bring up faulty logic, which is still equally valid.

As others have mentioned, layoffs should not be templatized, it is an indication that the company doesn't care much about the employees, the heart and soul of the company. I hope to God it was more than 5 minutes to draft a message to put 250 people out of a job in the middle of a Pandemic.

Putting it up to "well this is the standard of the industry" is bullshit, if you want more realistic examples, sexism in the work place is _not_ a hyperbole and is still very normal and very wrong.