There can be several reasons why they (and their employees) would want that though. Being very honest is not a positive in this case. Duplicate work and ambiguous ownership is fuzzy and unclear. They won't come out and say "we overhired and now we are shedding our deadweight" because no one wins with that more crude statement.

The least you can do for the laid off employees in this situation is try and not make it harder for them to find new jobs, so you keep the message vague.

It seems to me that "we overhired and need to fix that" is a message that would make things easier for those laid off. It's saying that the people are being laid off because of a business misjudgement by the company, not because those employees performed poorly.

>They won't come out and say "we overhired and now we are shedding our deadweight" because no one wins with that more crude statement.

to be frank, we should probably stop pretending they "overhired". That term implies that these MBAs were somehow blindsided by the imminent recession that analysts have talked about as far back as 2020 and that this wasn't an intentional strategy to maximize growth while labor was "cheap" (or at least, the money to hire labor).

This was all calculated and most companies still came out of this larger than when they entered the pandemic. It was all calculated and workers were nothing more than expendable pawns. Not much we can do about it without stronger labor laws, but that's a multi-decade battle.