Being laid off is terrible and I don't want to minimise the suffering it's causing for those involved. However Google had 55,000 more employees in 2022 than it

Being laid off is terrible and I don't want to minimise the suffering it's causing for those involved. However Google had 55,000 more employees in 2022 than it did in 2020, an increase of around 33%. It seems possible they actually didn't have enough for all these people to do. The company could easily afford to have kept these people on. But if, as seems likely, these people are talented individuals with lots of potential,then keeping them in roles where there's no opportunity to be productive would have had downsides too. It still sucks to get made redundant though.