A few months ago there was a Forbes contributor article (e.g., blog post) that claimed that Google was going to lay off 10,000 people (6% of the company). Their

A few months ago there was a Forbes contributor article (e.g., blog post) that claimed that Google was going to lay off 10,000 people (6% of the company). Their argument for this was that Google introduced a new performance review system in 2022 that changed the expected ratings distributions such that roughly 6% of the company was expected to receive either of the two ratings below the baseline "significant impact" rating. From this, oodles of news outlets reported the headline: "Google plans on laying off 10,000 people." The new performance review system was created in 2021 and announced in like March 2022. It is independent of the current context of tech layoffs. Maybe Google will lay people off, I don't know. But the original post is just baseless nonsense and it is frustrating to see it repeated all over the place.