Oh yeah, the reason these other companies are laying off thousands is because they've spent years hiring indiscriminately, and having many boondoggle (sp?) projects, numerous loss leader products ("we'll be profitable selling this at a loss, because we can spy on people more" - people complained about the cost of HomePod vs Alexa, etc and have said "speaker quality!" as the reason, but also all of those assistants are sold at or below cost).
The problem is that many are now doing a "we need to fire x% of the company so I can get my stock reward... I mean be profitable", and are doing it in arbitrary and short sighted ways (stack ranking is an incredibly stupid way to cut people), so while cutting N-1 of N chat teams at google might be reasonable, cutting teams working on potentially high value future tech _just_ because it's not currently profitable. Take Fuchsia: I worked on it during my brief google stint, and even if they did decide it didn't have a future (and I think that was not the rationale here), there were incredible engineers they've apparently discarded that would still have been good to keep working on other things at google.
Others have said FB and G were also mass hiring to stop people being hired by each other - I'm not sure how true that is, I was never involved in interviewing people at G but even if I were the interview system there seemed very strange to me so even if I were interviewing people I don't know if I'd have been aware of hiring-to-stop-FB nonsense.
The problem is that many are now doing a "we need to fire x% of the company so I can get my stock reward... I mean be profitable", and are doing it in arbitrary and short sighted ways (stack ranking is an incredibly stupid way to cut people), so while cutting N-1 of N chat teams at google might be reasonable, cutting teams working on potentially high value future tech _just_ because it's not currently profitable. Take Fuchsia: I worked on it during my brief google stint, and even if they did decide it didn't have a future (and I think that was not the rationale here), there were incredible engineers they've apparently discarded that would still have been good to keep working on other things at google.
Others have said FB and G were also mass hiring to stop people being hired by each other - I'm not sure how true that is, I was never involved in interviewing people at G but even if I were the interview system there seemed very strange to me so even if I were interviewing people I don't know if I'd have been aware of hiring-to-stop-FB nonsense.