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Hindsight is 20/20, though. The narrative from the company isn’t that “we purposefully overhired and are now laying the excess off for fun”, it’s that they believed they would have use for the excess given the trajectory of the company and the overall economy but they were mistaken. Which is not particularly strange - the future is famously hard to predict.

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There is also genuine benefit to overhiring and then laying off laggards: interviews aren’t perfect, and you can find hidden gems by taking risks on unconventional candidates.

I agree to a certain degree, but not when "Speculating As Much As 20% Workforce Reductions". They have tools like taking advantage of natural attrition.

Note that the 20% workforce reduction is within one relatively small portion of the company. IIRC, this is also the portion of the company that works on the Intel branded servers they were somehow still building in 2023. They are finally exiting that business and those workers are redundant. What would you have these workers do when their entire reason for being hired and employed no longer exists?

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