I don't agree with this argument.
In the 1990s (and earlier) and 2000s startups were "rebels", almost countercultural (to Corporate America at least). Think about the famous 1984 Macintosh ad that evoked George Orwell. There's a famous story about Steve Jobs remembering a magazine called the Whole Earth Catalog from the 1970s with a picture captioned "Stay hungry, stay foolish". If you listen to Steve Jobs talk about Corporate America, he talks about John Scully or Xerox where conformity ruled. NOthing really challenged the status quo. Nobody really cared about products. Everything was run by accountants, finance people and sales people.
This attitude persisted into the 2010s. Google was quite famous up until that time for shipping when ready, basically. Decisions were engineering-driven rather than being driven by launch dates, product goals, marketing, finance, sales or quarterly earnings. They famously studied what made teams successful with Project Aristotle [1] and concluded that the number one factor was psychological safety.
In the 2020s we have a vastly different picture of neurodivergence than existed in the 2000s and even the 2010s. A lot of the people who found success at Google. Famous examples include the likes of Urs Holzle who famously wrote a user manual [2] for interacting with him. Many of these people did not or would not survive let alone flourish in Corporate America. Why? Because it's a social/political game almost entirely divorced from output. Google's technical infrastructure remains top-notch to this day. They're still coasting on that inertia and what Urs built, both technically and culturally.
But Google slowly dismantled all that. Careers got formalized into job ladders. Getting promoted got harder (eg compare getting promoted to Staff Engineer in 2010 vs 2025). They added stack ranking, which is just a popularity contest and reeks of the Corporate America social/political capital (and I'll die on that hill).
But worst of all (IMHO) was the change in the 2020s that moved from job security (and thus psychological safety) to Corporate America's "up or out" approach. I'm talking of course of about permanent mass layoffs. I cannot begin to describe to you how toxic of an environment that is by comparison. Nitpickers might point out that engineers always had an "up or out" to Senior SWE but it's not the same.
There were other initiatives too like the new CFO Ruth Porat changing the promotion percentages (because nobody had any visibility into that), reducing discretionary equity, etc.
Did Google need to do any of this? At differen ttimes during all this the annual profit per employee was hovering around $1 million. So the answer is "no".
But the fate of any company is that it gets sufficiently large where the only way to keep growing profits is to raise prices or cut costs and for a tech company, labor costs are a major part of the cost structure.
This isn't a Google-specific issue. Google is just a bellwether for the entire industry. The mass layoffs all started about the same time when interest rates were still zero I might add. It's not the first time the industry has engaged in collusion eg [3].
Google to me feels like the new Boeing. Boeing coasted for many years on the 747 and 737 also became a major defense contractor. That inertia took them a long way but there are cracks. The 737MAX was a debacle. The 787 was an outsourcing shitshow.
And hey look where Intel is compared to even 10 years ago. It would be unimaginable given their decades of lithography and engineering dominance. But it's like the move to 10nm just completely broke them and they never recovered.
So I reject that this was a ZIRP issue of being engineering-driven (which is really what we're talking about here). After all, that wasn't a thing before 2008 either.
[1]: https://psychsafety.com/googles-project-aristotle/
[2]: https://codenote.net/en/posts/6191/
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...