It’s more convenient to pretend that these “tech workers” didn’t have to have packed their ears full of cement to not know what rollercoaster they were getting on by working for these companies.

It's easy to say tech companies "just over hired" during the pandemic. But for some companies that just not the case.

Google's 2019 revenue was 161.85; it's 2022 revenue was 282.83. Some of these companies legitimately just grew a lot during covid (and probably would've grown anyways).

Of course some companies like Twitter were hemorrhaging money; but if your revenue per employee is in the millions it's a pretty good question of why are you firing anybody.

Google is a massive company. There are some incredibly unprofitable departments that have a negative impact per employee.

When cutting back at that scale it’s never performance based on an individual level. Its performance based as a business unit.

Well; I think you're going to have a great deal of trouble showing that the 6% layoff in 2023 was targeted to "incredibly unprofitable departments" considering basically every department had fired employees.

But also Google then spent like 8 months of salary per fired employee (severance & etc). Surely it's cheaper to figure out how to move the employee from the unnamed "incredibly unprofitable department" to a profitable department. Like Google had 186,779 employees end of 2022 Q3 which drops down to 182,381 in 2023 Q3.

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To get back onto the article, it does make the claim of "tech company workforces have largely returned to pre-pandemic levels".