Featured in this episode of Chaos Lever
Last week Microsoft announced the layoff of 10k people in its workforce and now Google has followed suit with a reduction of 12k people. Both companies have said something along the lines of, “Well we overhired during the pandemic, and now the market and economic environment has shifted and we find that we are overemployed.”
While it might be true that they hired to meet projected demand during the pandemic, and that the overall economic outlook isn’t as rosy as some might like, a post from Gergely Orosz rightly points out that Microsoft and Google aren’t exactly hurting for money.
Microsoft had net income of 61.3B in 2022. Not revenue, profit. Google hasn’t reported their year end results for 2022 yet, but for the first 9 months they are sitting at $46.3B in net income. Not revenue, this is net income.
I realize that “it’s more complicated than that,” but you know what? These two companies made over $100B in profit this year, and they can’t continue to employ 22k people during a financial downturn? I may not understand the complexities of the modern economy; however, I can still smell bullshit when it’s under my nose.