I believe Google looked at alternatives and chose this approach to avoid worse problems. In particular, there's no way they could have communicated this to managers and had them keep it secret for several days (managers at Google leak internally like a sieve). If they had, the managers also would have insisted on choosing who got laid off which would have led to a long negotiation practice. Managers at Google are <i>great</i> at slowing down process through meetings/negotiation. Also, it would have been an ugly scene with lines of people waiting to go to their manager for "a final talk" which itself would lead to pleading and negotiation. Finally, entire chains were eliminated- an IC, their manager, and their director- so then some VP would have to deal with all the meetings, and VPs are good at pushing back against SVPs asking them to do that.