Honest question: Why don't large scale acqui-hires happen in these situations? Often hiring is one of the top challenges for these companies. They go through 100s of resumes and interview dozens just for each role. Times that by 300+ people and it’s an incredible amount of effort and value here. So to fire 300+ people is years and years worth of human lives that went into hiring that many top tier tech employees.
I’m sure Google or someone would pay a TON of money to have them all sent down to Mountain View for the day to do a huge round of interviewing. The same way they do for smaller-scale startup acqui-hires.
Mass firings are seen as a opportunity to get rid of your "worst" employees because you have strong plausible deniability if the reason for firing is anything other then the massive layoff. Employee trying to start a union? Raising politically sensitive issues? Under-performing? Questioning management? Negative personality? Taking too many days off? Not popular on your team? Companies are aware of this and it contributes strongly to the negative signal assigned to be involved in a mass layoff.
I’m sure Google or someone would pay a TON of money to have them all sent down to Mountain View for the day to do a huge round of interviewing. The same way they do for smaller-scale startup acqui-hires.