>> fired thousands unprofessionally > How do you fire thousands professionally? I thought ensuring market and shareholder satisfaction was the top priority for CEOs and they get paid to make those unpopular decisions as/when deemed fit?

While true, it's fairly obvious that the Google firings have been badly mishandled. There are stories of SREs getting fired/locked out while still on duty. And in general, sending firing emails at 4am in the morning is very bad class in a company that claims where "don't be evil" and "trust your employees" are pillars of the company is, ... well, not good for PR.

What would be your preferred time to receive an email about your layoff?

I’m not sure if you are being intentionally obtuse, but the obvious answer is that rather than being locked out in the middle of the night, people would prefer to be told directly by a human (ideally their manager), and given the opportunity to say goodbye to their colleagues.

There’s a reason they don’t don that: what if a rogue employee among the thousands laid off decides to leak PII or trade secrets

That’s a complete straw man. Microsoft, Meta and others managed to pull off safely laying off employees while still treating them respectfully and allowing them to say goodbye.

Guess what: Europe doesn't do instant termination and the roof hasn't collapsed.

I mean, Google did not think through the layoff enough to make sure they were even legal in all the countries before announcing them.

They ended up rolling back the France layoffs when they realized they goofed, but Germany and the UK are still pending.

If that's not an example of rushed, I don't know what is.

Or how about sending that "Cloud had the best year ever" hours before the Canadian layoffs were announced.