This wasn't that. This was a case of 1) over-hiring during covid, and 2) Google has expanded amoeba-like for the past decade (outside of Ads) and the result is that there are thousands of people, hundreds of projects and dozens of product areas that are staffed with people who A) were excellent hires at the time, but B) due to organizational drift over time, are no longer in roles that play to their strengths or allow them & Google to bring expansive new features & products to the market. I'm sure there are some low performers, but the vast majority of affected employees here (including a lot of the ones who are/were low performers) are that way because of management decisions over time, not because they are individually "bad" employees. Fwiw, getting into this state is partly due to over-exuberant hiring and investment in new things over the past several years, where free money and huge profits made it relatively low risk to do so.