Why the Google layoffs are about personal ambition and poor leadership

Recently, Google announced it was laying off approximately 6% of its workforce (or 12,000 people). This brings it in line with most of the rest of the tech industry. The reason given by a publicly contrite CEO was that they’d overhired in the boom following the COVID pandemic and that now they had to address it but they were oh-so-sorry and took full responsibility. Like many others my first reaction to this rationale was “bullshit”. I imagine the same is true for the people at Meta, Amazon, Microsoft et al going through this. I spent 10 years at Google so I have some views on how these things come about and they don’t reflect well on the people running the company.