On January 20, 2023, Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google and its group parent Alphabet, announced 12,000 redundancies worldwide. His explanation was the same as that given by other Silicon Valley bosses making job cuts in the past year: “Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today,” he wrote to employees. At the time, the 2022 annual accounts released to the Nasdaq Stock Market two weeks later were already on Pichai’s desk. They showed a slowdown in…