> They fired some talented folks. Folks who could be retrained.

I see this sentiment a lot on HN. To be clear, I am responding from the perspective of US labor law and general business practices. Employment is not a sacred right in the US. The US system is (larely) hire and fire easily. As a result, the US economy is mildly unstable for the middle class normies (much, much less stable that most other highly developed nations with strong labor laws -- most of G7/G20), but overall wildly dynamic for a large economy.

"They fired some talented folks."

Sure. That is guaranteed with large layoffs. I work in an insanely competitive industry, and there are annual culls each autumn of the bottom 5%. Few are surprised by who gets cut. What is harder to forsee is a business downturn and they need to layoff X% of staff. You see good people let go. That's just life in that kind of system.

"Folks who could be retrained."

Again, in the US, for white-collar office workers, this almost never happens, and surely not for very highly skilled software developers (probably most of the layoffs at Cloudflare). It is not required by law, and it is not a common business practice in the US.