>I'd be astonished if a company with a market cap of $1.2 trillion would be likely to collapse if it didn't immediately get rid of 12,000 people right now.
They need to do a layoff to show that they did a layoff, even if they secretly hired a "buffer" of 12k people in the months leading up to it, or will secretly fill back 12k headcounts in the months to come.
Google in particular needs to make intense investments in GCP so that they don't miss the train for capturing the cloud market. It's probably the only credible challenger to the AWS-Azure duopoly. This layoff is probably painful to their business.
They need to do a layoff to show that they did a layoff, even if they secretly hired a "buffer" of 12k people in the months leading up to it, or will secretly fill back 12k headcounts in the months to come.
Google in particular needs to make intense investments in GCP so that they don't miss the train for capturing the cloud market. It's probably the only credible challenger to the AWS-Azure duopoly. This layoff is probably painful to their business.