That's the thing though, its not tough for everyone. Its only tough for the employee, the employer gets more money. Its not tough for them at all.
That said, I meant it was tough on all employees, not just those fired, to be going through layoffs.
The company with billions of dollars in the bank will have teams of people assessing risk management. But apparently those assessments didn’t address the human risk of over hiring tens of thousands of people to such a degree that they ‘need’ to dispose of them at the first sign of trouble.
Other sectors of the economy didn’t see such drastic layoffs so they can’t claim it’s a widespread and unforeseeable problem. They made a risky bet that had a real human cost, and people are right to wonder what’s the point of mega corps if they’re not any better at this than a small or medium business.
Big tech expanded a LOT during the pandemic. Too much.
Google hired 30,300 people in 2022! (and 21k in 2021)
While layoffs are tough for everyone (especially those losing the job), if you expanded too fast, I think that an early reset is probably better than burning through more cash to deal with a bigger problem later, when you then might have to make deeper employee cuts than if you'd acted sooner.
After these layoffs Google will still be a LOT bigger than it was a year ago.