The Google layoffs are about personal ambition and poor leadership

Nevermind all these difficult projects you worked on. Nevermind that your ex colleagues gave you glowing references. Nevermind all your open source projects. Nevermind that the project you led and worked on has never been hacked in 3 years in spite of having hundreds of millions of dollars at stake. It's all worthless because I don't see any fancy branding in your resume.

When the people oustide it stop seeing it as a business, then Google's goose is cooked.

First the layoff were a fairly obvious hamfisted way to simply appease investors. Profit margins are in-line with historical norms, 2021 was an outlier and it is insane to expect profit growth not to slow from that - the company is still wildly profitable. It really just demonstrates that the vision of being a 'unconventional' company is gone, and the vision of the executive team is just to react to whatever perceived threat is in-front of them that week (activist investors, now 'generative AI') and, of course, maximize their stock compensation.

Google 'bloat'. This is a bit undeniable but it's also unavoidable for companies Google's size. There are like eight layers of management between people who do things and people who talk about doing things. That number is probably too high but I'm not sure people have figured out a great alternative other than 'hierarchy' for directing an army of people. Honestly the best thing management can do is 'rest-and-vest' and rewrite the same vision/roadmap document/deck ten times under different names least they try to demonstrate their value by constantly re-orging and shuffling around priorities (millionaire children moving the food around their plate to make it seem eaten).

Total comp and lavish 'perks'. Google's talent is, on average, better than most other companies and it hires in very expensive areas so it's going to be more expensive. It is very clear they are moving hiring to cheaper 'discount' areas so this will likely stall/decrease. The 'perks' are heavily overstated. This is a fun fake narrative. The micro-kitichens are like bulk processed gains and cereals or faux-healthy products that manage to both be not particularly appetizing, not actually healthy (a chickpea fried in vegetable oil is still bad for you), and not expensive - so they are mostly just for show and sit there untouched. The cafe food is served in troughs again with an emphasis on the cheaper vegetable or grains upfront or the infamous kale -with a single trough with any protein at the end that they still try to partially submerge in quinoa. There are long tables where employees eat quickly and alone. It's an overtly cynical exercise to make you work longer and just like 'unlimited vacation' the dealer is clearly winning here. Same goes with travel or 'fun' budgets, all cut and now the same as any other company.