[acdha]

You also have to look at productivity: if you lay people off you will have disruption and lower productivity with the remaining workers unless it’s something like a fairly isolated subsidiary being cut loose. It can also make people hesitate to take a job with you in the future.

In general, it’s better to keep people if you’re profitable even if you want the margin to be higher. Google’s problem is more their management – in a less rudderless environment you could come up with things for people to work on but when you’re mostly sitting around hoping the ad words money fountain keeps running it probably is true that you can’t figure out what to have them do.