There are a lot of good reasons to choose one company over another, but a company having a significant decrease in employee count during only 1 of the past 20 years would not be high on my list. In 2013 Google’s employee count decreased by almost the same in percentage in IBM did in the past year. Does that mean everyone should avoid working for Google? In any case, it was an arbitrary example. You can replace IBM with most large tech companies and get the same conclusion.