As an interviewer I wouldn’t look on that badly either. The job market nosedived. Simple as that so it’s not inconceivable that many talented people have been out of work for a long time.
Companies don't fire talented people. They fire those, who, during the good times were just barely adequate for the job they did, and in the bad times they became liability.
In my experience, this isn't true. I worked at a company that fired a lot of the best people they had. The reason? Marketing people took over the leadership of the company and they thought skilled engineers who were making more money could be replaced by cheaper "resources".
This is one strategy, but it usually is only a small subset. More often the people left behind are the people that have some additional relationship going that keeps them safe. I've seen some very talented people that were not getting along with their manager or at least not buddies. In harder times like now I've seen it even more arbitrary.
Anyone let go right now - it sucks - but it isn't you that sucks. It is the monkeys that are managing the pandemic that suck.
I've had to lay off a lot of talented people in my day. Startups fail. Established companies pivot and dissolve business units. It sucks and it happens all the time.
I don't know about this crisis, but in the last crisis, 2008 or whatever, they fired everyone.
Where I worked, 200 people working on two products at a start up became 100 people working on 1 product at a startup all in the course of a single morning, and the people working on the product that got the axe were just as smart as the people working on the product that didn't.
Some of them didn't work for years - all smart capable developers, but no one was hiring. It's sort of surprising that didn't happen this year, but the next crisis is always right around the corner.
It's a grand pronouncement, and also pretty detached from reality to claim that companies never fire talented people. A few counterexamples: Steve Jobs, JK Rowling, Walt Disney, Thomas Edison, Isaac Newton, Jerry Seinfeld, Nikola Tesla... the list goes on.
I would say that's most of the time. Companies often have to outsource their head-hunting because so many of them are so bad at it, and entire companies have been created (e.g. TripleByte) because other companies can't figure out how to properly measure talent.
And arguably, the main reason in the first place that managers hire so many people they are OK letting go later on is because their managers (one level up) aren't able to properly observe it happening, on account of the measurement being so poor. If the measurement is that poor, you're basically guaranteed to have hired lots of great people who won't have the opportunity to flourish.
That's probably true for targeted layoffs -- with a giant codicil -- but when you see big chunks of an org laid off it's not. It means engineers or PMs or whatever accepted the wrong job.
The codicil is that I'm not sure you can separate someone's productivity from their fit in that role, with the given management and stage of the company.