Since Satya Microsoft has gotten much mellower in terms of performance ratings maybe to a fault; 80% of interns get full time offers and I personally know of a team of five senior engineers making collectively over a million in base pay alone whose sole collective responsibility is managing the UI buttons for a fairly minor product. The issue in an industry that actually produces stuff (as opposed to creating like financial instruments from pre-existing assets and selling those) is that it's IC-based, and sometimes it's justifiable resource-wise to just keep on senior engineers that you know for a fact will be useful in the future even if you have nothing for them to do right now rather than go through the hoops to find actually good new ones at that level if and when the need arises. Balmer didn't understand this and tried to run it like a financial firm instead of a tech company, which I'm honestly shocked didn't kill it altogether. I think what Google is doing isn't what Enron was trying to do; what Enron execs wanted was to light a fire under their employees asses, what Google is doing is judging long-term growth and whether it's worth it to keep on engineers that aren't really necessary to whatever product they're working on right now. Not excusing them, just saying big tech is often pretty bloated and often prints enough money that it's not an issue for them to keep people on rather than hiring new, but things seem to be getting bad enough to the point that they feel the need to take such measures.