I really hate how I read about this on the news, not first but only there. The last layoff came and went without a peep from any management above me, even week+ later. Looks like the same again.
I was around for a big Microsoft layoff many years ago and it was well communicated internally and empathically.
We were given audience (10:1) with directors upon request to ask questions and plead for our fallen.
The individuals let go were eulogized with authentic tears by the humans who were given headcount by corporate and then had it taken away.
It wasn't the bottom or some biased subset that was culled, but a seemingly random selection across bands to hit a target. (I'm inclined to believe this, given what I saw).
We lobbied for our people, and actually got one hired back in a different division that wasn't subject to the layoff.
We learned about the Microsoft layoffs in the news yesterday and right now nobody knows who will be impacted. I'm sure they will handle it as well as they can, but learning about it from the news first instead of the CEO is also odd. We did get an email from Satya this morning but it appears that notifying impacted folks will be done in a distributed manner by their management chain.
Most of the company isn't hiring now so there won't be many internal jobs that those being terminated could try to apply for.
Also at Microsoft - zero communication until the Satya email today too. Heard about it in the news and mostly in the news. Not great in terms of communication.
> but learning about it from the news first instead of the CEO is also odd.
Isn't that always the case? It is hard to keep something like a huge layoff secret, it will invariably leak as soon as the cogs are set into motion and before the CEO can message the ranks.
Well at Microsoft the CEO does a great job usually announcing major news via email to employees and releasing it for investors publicly at the same time. Not so this time.
I worked at MS for 9 years and rumors always seemed to be a little bit ahead of executive messaging. But I left in 2016, so maybe it was a different time.
Possibly is a result of the SEC rules regarding insider information - not sure a company as big as MSFT or AMZN can give a heads up to 'insiders' before investors for something that may materially affect the company - and big layoffs definitely qualify as impactful - for better or worse.
...and because the huge companies are so closely followed on wall street and financial news, once news is released to the media - they are going to run with it as soon as they get it - not wait until employees get notified first.
The ‘Insider information’ framework needs to be updated for the modern world.
Hedge funds tracking parking lots with low orbit satellites have more insider information than any official channel.
Even tweeting information to the whole world simultaneously can breach II rules when it doesn’t really apply since it automatically puts everyone on more equal footing.
> Hedge funds tracking parking lots with low orbit satellites have more insider information than any official channel.
That's not an example of an insider abusing their inside position for their benefit, it's an example of a hedge fund deciding that investing in low-orbit satellite photography gives them an edge in estimating market movement.
Exactly right, thank you for saying this. I will never forget back in the 00s, when electronic market makers were squeezing out floor traders and the pits were closing down, an outraged floor trader exclaimed to me: “They’re using .. COMPUTERS! To trade!”, in a tone that suggested how grossly unfair and (in the spirit of many a hacker news comment) how insider-trader-y it was.
Every employee is an investor too. It could be orchestrated within reason, or at least attempted.
But what I'm talking about is there were layoffs in the news and not a single peep about it in my email inbox or slack channel, nor even during 1:1 with my direct manager later that week.
Ok so it breaks to the news first, it seems common courtesy for the person managing your career path to check your pulse.
> Possibly is a result of the SEC rules regarding insider information
SEC insider information laws were the same during the DotCom boom/bust of 2000. Yet firing practices were quite different despite the fact that employees also had stock options/shares like they have now.
Indeed! I am just a cog in their work machine. But the reverse is also true. They're simply a funding source in my "life machine". I do get some joy out of engineering and building stuff but, the paycheck ensures the rest of my life goes well. They could terminate the relationship, but so could I. I don't expect any of them to show up to my funeral.
It's better and worse.
Performance isn't quantitatively tracked at all times, so firing whoever some low level manager elects is subject to incredible bias, and I think a major lawsuit risk.
The "we lobbied for our people" is also weird. If at the end of the day $x million in salary has to be cut, and it's meritorious for a company to do it randomly rather than pruning the bottom whatever percent, it's extremely weird to add to that "a subset of people didn't lose their jobs because people in my department liked them". I'd say the best case scenario here is that the "lobbying" had no effect, and the emotional availability of management was just to make everyone feel better.
Correct, lobbying had no effect on the immediate employment status of an individual.
But we were given an outlet, and through that an explanation of why we lost an essential engineer and friend. I'd like to believe that it had an effect on the management team. If not for them to bear some of the emotional load, then to inform them XYZ project is going to take a major hit and this week or so is a write off for the rest of us.
Hypothetically, that might be a way to find out who the true top performers are, the ones that may not show up in quantitative rankings. It would be an awful way to go about it though, so I hope that wasn't the idea.
I got a company-wide email approximately two hours after it was already all over the news. Ideally the insiders should know first and at worst, the press release and internal should go at the same time. This is just absurd.
I wonder what the protocol is there? Do you continue the meeting and finish it up or do you just stop it? Was his access to all corporate systems just turned off so the meeting just cut out?
I knew a guy who was in the middle of a consulting engagement when he got an email that he was part of a layoff. He finished the day with the customer since he had a relationship with the people there and figured he was being paid for that day anyways.
I wouldn't. Getting laid off is a lifechanging event, on the approximate level of an immediate family member going to the ER. Both require leaving the office immediately.
My teammates (if they are still employed) can sort it out.
no one's irreplaceable life is immediately endangered in the case of a layoff. apples and baseball bats.
if required by the employer to leave immediately, then there is no choice in the matter, rendering OP's question moot. if not, and you ditch your team, then you're (editorial you, not parent poster you) the asshole. do your fellow human a kindness, as opposed to just selfishly passing along the garbage, and you'll make the world a marginally better place.
Absolutely. This happened multiple times throughout my career in Tech. Everything I devoted my life to for years, taken from me, multiple times. There is no such thing as job security.
This is the problem (not the actual problem, but the one you can control). Your job isn't your life. I used to think/act this way. Then I was eliminated in a rather soulless manner myself. I realized it was an abusive relationship. I had actual PTSD for a couple of years. I no longer define myself by anything that is so transactional. Business relationships are just that. I am happier, I make more money at job, and I've got several things prioritized over work that fulfill me.
The problem is, Amazon is one of those cult-like places who drill you into thinking you’re blessed with the best job in the world and to live the “amazon way”
I can totally seeing someone who joined early in their career falling for that BS
Why do you expect it? Large corporations have stacked the deck against workers for decades (at least). If you really want to be able to work the same job forever, you can try to get yourself a special contract, but you'd have better luck getting such worker protections by working with your state government or fellow workers.
If you're worried that too many benefits, compensation, insurance, ability to rent, etc. are tied to employment, you're right there, and we can do better as a society to expand unemployment insurance and get affordable health care that isn't tied to employment, etc. This way, when we do lose a job, not everything is taken is from us.
> Everything I devoted my life to for years, taken from me, multiple times.
Sounds like you need to step back and re-evaluate your approach. Your work for a large, soulless corporation should not be what you devoted your life to. It's work, not your life.
At least we have it relatively easy (I think you're talking about programming positions?). Imagine working in a mine or something and then what do you do.
I think these comparisons are kind of disingenuous.
Of course we understand what you mean. But on the other hand, it's kind of not relevant at all. OPs life is not that one of a coal miner. In theory this person has worked hard all his life, studied, dedicated time to companies. This is what he is doing. Then it's kind of taken away without his control.
Saying "well at least you don't work in a mine" is minimizing his real problem so much.
Should it be put in perspective? Sure. But it also doesn't really make it any better.
Infact I would argue that kind of response is kind of like "hey why should we give everyone free healthcare? At least you have access to healthcare for money, 100 years ago we barely even had medicine so you should feel lucky!". True.. but also completely misses the entire point.
There is a major difference between dedicating your life to developing a highly portable skill that you can do from your house and dedicating your life to physical labor that could get you killed and has ever decreasing opportunities for work.
Yes, it's super lame if someone loves their job somewhere and gets laid off. It's a bit less lame if that person is highly paid and can find work doing almost the exact same thing somewhere else without leaving their house.
I took your parent to mean there are no more jobs out there without moving to another mining town. Versus a programmer job where there are plenty of other "mines" available.
Companies do layoffs in a dehumanizing way largely to avoid lawsuits. If individual managers communicate it, some might say something wrong and invite a lawsuit. Even if they don't say anything wrong, some of the people being laid-off may misremember what they were told, and without a clear record of what they were told, they might win a lawsuit. In contrast, a mass email laying people off has the advantages that lawyers can review it beforehand, and it is clearly document exactly what was told to the employee in the course of laying them off.
The other part is they want to lay everyone off at the same time, so people aren't finding out at different times and wondering if they are safe or not. An email, sent to everyone at the same time, achieves that much better than trying to rapidly schedule a lot of simultaneous meetings.
Perhaps there is a better way, but that is the conventional wisdom that I've heard from folks planning layoffs.
Why doesn't the company announce that they are going to cut about so and so many people in the next this and that timeframe? A lot of folks would go willingly anyway. (As this happens in other countries.)
Managers can pick before the announcement and then HR can do the actual if not enough people left willingly.
And there's always a chance of wrongful termination lawsuits...
... the real reason this is done this way is because that's the culture of these companies, mostly due to US culture (and labor laws are a synergic manifestation of this).
People aren't interchangeable. The company might want to layoff 10%, but they don't want to layoff just any 10%. They will want to layoff people in positions and teams that they want to do away with, and to the extent some people are interchangeable, they would like to layoff those that are the least productive.
If you announce layoffs before telling people who will get cut, the people who tend to leave voluntarily are often those most able to get jobs elsewhere because they are high performers in positions that are hard to staff -- so exactly who the company wants to keep.
Cue comments about how tech is the best place to work and the most comfy job around and we should be lucky to be picked for this glorious position and no tech unions are just dumb
It can be difficult for co-ops to access capital. Investors are extremely hesitant to invest money in an organization where the employees can simply vote to use that money to give themselves all raises.
There are other ways to achieve what you're after: stock options, profit-sharing agreements, or even just a generous bonus structure based on hitting revenue targets are all quite common.
And all of those things aren't enough, as demonstrated by every company that's doing them now. Beyond entry level dev jobs, most of Amazon's corporate employees are getting half or more of their comp in stock. Yet here we are.
You can already form such a company. It would be called an LLP. It's common in other professions, not sure why it hasn't been a thing in software though.
Why? Because of layoffs? Thats not a reason to unionize. Maybe what we should be doing is asking our CEOs, GMs, product people, etc why we need to go on these hiring sprees in the first place, which seem to put the entire employee base in jeopardy when "times get tough.
If the goal of these layoffs is to "do more with less", then maybe we as technologists should find a way to do that ourselves.
>Why? Because of layoffs? Thats not a reason to unionize. Maybe what we should be doing is asking our CEOs, GMs, product people, etc why we need to go on these hiring sprees in the first place, which seem to put the entire employee base in jeopardy when "times get tough.
Yeah, for the most part, asking those questions is a great way to get fired in many, many companies, especially if you ask those questions in a forum or format that makes leadership look bad. I am not sure where I stand on unions for tech workers (I grew up in a union mining town where the union saved lives by driving safety measures, but also got fined by the union on the first day of my first job for refilling an ink tray because the shop steward thought I needed a lesson), but at the end of the day, unions provide a method for engaging with the business to negotiate and ask these questions without fear of arbitrary retaliation.
In this case, the union could be forcing better treatment for the people laid off (notice, severance, timing, etc.) and also the people staying (no “do your job and your former coworker’s or you’re next”).
No, that's not going to happen. First we are too independent, too many libertarians. But the main reason is I think we still feel like there are lots of opportunities to find jobs.
I'd love to pay 5% or something like that for job insurance that would cover me if the company died, or they start laying off people in a downturn. That would be 5% you don't have though.
If you worked there a decade you might be. Not everyone is in that category. If you bought a place in the Seattle area, you probably sank most of your excess money into it. That might be a temporarily depreciating asset (prices slightly down compared to last year). It's not like 10 years at Microsoft and you are retired.
> Amazon is trimming its head count after it went on a hiring spree during the Covid-19 pandemic. The company’s global workforce swelled to more than 1.6 million by the end of 2021, up from 798,000 in the fourth quarter of 2019.
This makes the news a bit less shocking, I think. Many tech companies are suffering — and laying off — due to the economy, and didn’t “swell” quite to the level Amazon did during the pandemic.
While I’m sure the economy is still certainly a factor here, it would make sense for a company that needed to expand to meet the sudden demands brought on by the pandemic to need to course-correct once that died down.
Especially since it was felt:
> primarily in its human resources and stores divisions
Both of these probably had to ramp up disproportionately to meet the sudden demands of the pandemic.
To be clear, this is still sad/unfortunate news for the affected folks. But I believe it's not quite the shock other news of layoffs has been.
Amazon actually "only" earned $2.5 billion profit in Q3 2022, which is pretty low considering their size. Compare to their layoff buddies (and apparently "doomed company") Meta, whose profit was $5.6 billion.
Amazon intentionally doesn’t make a profit. It’s an excellent tax avoidance strategy and since their shareholders are OK with it a fantastic way to put their competition out of business.
a lot of tech companies approached hiring from an anti-competitive perspective. they hired staff they didn't need, in order to keep them off the market and pull the oxygen out of the room for startups that might eventually threaten their dominance in the 5-10 year timescale. the old "rest and vest" type thing. companies are now reducing headcount down to a level that's more commensurate with actual business needs.
same thing happened in the 2000s... mass layoffs resulted in a wave of new startups and competitors in the 5-10 year timescale. forest fires clean out the accumulated undergrowth and allow a new lifecycle to begin. not to imply that it sucks any less for anyone who lost their job, but, this is a release of anticompetitive pressure and it'll probably be a long-term net positive for the market overall.
That's right. I got hired in April 2021 and by the time I quit in August 2022, more than 50% of employees were newer than me (they have a tool called oldfart, where you can check your seniority).
Eh, it's misleading because it is not all tech. Drivers, warehouse, EAs, etc. Most tech companies are heavily dominated by tech employees, Amazon is different in that regard and given the pandemic saw a surge in demand for shipping, it seems entirely tenable for the company to grow so expediently.
The majority of those million+ workers are working jobs as an option against fast food. Productive is 'pick thing out of bin, place in box', not creativity/etc.
Don't confuse the relatively tiny tech company wrapped inside the worlds largest logistics and fulfillment organization.
Amazon is an order of magnitude larger than other tech companies in terms of headcount because they also have all their drivers, distribution centers, fulfillment centers, Whole Foods, Etc.
I think most people here are more interested in how many full time salaried employees Amazon has and what percentage do these layoffs contain? And then additionally how many people that are in product/engineering affected?
Do they really? I regularly find 30% cost optimisation potentials in large organisations. It is just easier to fire people than optimise workloads and infrastructure.
On the other side, I haven't seen companies giving extra bonuses when the economy is booming.
> On the other side, I haven't seen companies giving extra bonuses when the economy is booming.
I'm sure horse and sparrow economics[0] will start working any day now...
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics Mr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a cover for the trickle-down approach to economic policy—what an older and less elegant generation called the horse-and-sparrow theory: "If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows."
> "If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.”
sounds like a framing error to me. “Trickle-down” is a term used by critics to reframe the creation of wealth as essentially a zero-sum game. The same Wikipedia article[0] cites Thomas Sowell [1] and I find him more compelling.
If modern corporations disbursed the profits from excess production back into society, we’d all be working a few days a week at most as Keynes had predicted I suspect.
However it turns out that’s not the case. Most of this seems to be profit grabbing while the market expectation is, “economy bad.”
Sounds like you have a common mis-conception that a lot of people who entered the workforce after 2008 have: that bonuses are a given, and part of your salary. Lot's o' people this year won't be getting their bonuses because companies aren't doing well, sales slowed, etc. The very definition of a BONUS is that's it's something you get when the times are good.
(I'm sure it's the same with Stock Options, that people just assumed they'd go up, probably why all the memes about Total Comp are all over social media?)
I have been in the "workforce" since 1995. What do I know about this, right? I never said what you are claiming. I simply stated the obvious. Companies exposing bad economy on employees while never give out more when economy is doing great. This is in fact true. What is the motivation and what should we do about it is a different question.
FYI every article on this is getting the math wrong. It's 18,000 with today plus the layoffs in November (which the press quoted at 10,000), not 18,000 today.
Assuming the press was correct in November, it's 8,000 today.
There are thousands job cuts and hiring freeze in this industry. While 1.2% is nothing, that 1.2% won't have easy time to get re-hire when there's a massive layoffs in the specific industry they're on + hiring freeze + recession coming up.
Having a 7% unregretted attribution target is pretty different than a 7% layoff. Many (most?) of the folks who make up that 7% leave on their own, because both the employee and the company are on the same page that it isn't working out.
A 7% layoff affects some people who are good employees, did nothing wrong, and are safe from a PIP -- but their position just no longer makes sense for the company to keep.
Most people don't think they're the bottom 7% of workers in their field. Also to have a FAANG company on their resume or maybe just because they were in need of income at the point in time the job was offered to them.
Different people have different confidence and risk tolerance.
I once advised someone like this - take the Amazon offer. First of all, YOU (this guy was excellent and driven) aren't likely to be in the bottom X percent.
And even if you are, the X years you spend at Amazon will teach you skills (not to mention resume) you won't get anywhere else. So even if you got laid off, you'd be better off long run.
I know several experienced people who quit less than 3 months before a big stock vest. They all said it was so stressful and terrible they couldn't stand another day, even for another 250k. Soul deadening, they called it.
They all got jobs at other big companies, but without that stress.
The answer is that Amazon pays well and carries prestige on your resume, just not compared to other FAANG or other USA startups that are at the forefront of tech.
The company also has significant growth opportunities compared to mid-sized startups or legacy companies hiring tech workers.
There are also many really talented people and mentors there. The forced attrition makes it mostly suck however.
I don't necessarily agree with this. Myself (and others) in the Seattle area are vocally biased against hiring Amazon alumni (especially for leadership positions) as we've found they're a significant risk to our company culture.
Many others disagree with you because of various reasons.
PS: I'm with you though; prefer not to have ex-Amazon because somehow that company can turn good people into sharks preying on others when moved on. Maybe because in order to survive there one must learn and adapt, therefore "becoming" as ruthless/cutthroat as them.
I happily hire ICs that have been successful in the past at Amazon; they tend to have high output, good analytical / soft skills, and are generally pretty happy to not be at Amazon anymore.
the middle management layer is way more mixed, and where a lot of the putative toxicity comes from. Those people often bring the bad part of Amazon culture with them (especially those from more recent vs. earlier years).
That feels contradictory. You disagree with the person who says they don't like to hire ex-amazon, but you yourself prefer not to hire ex-amazon. Sorry, what's your point?
They really don’t though. I thought this way for awhile until I became friends with some junior/mid level devs who spent months depressed because they wanted any job.
I wish Amazon recruiters would honor my perennial request to permanently remove me from any of their hiring systems and never contact me again, but I think that process has steadily taught me just how much recruiters aren't operating from a CRM-like centralized system and are just directly using LinkedIn to source prospects.
> I wish Amazon recruiters would honor my perennial request to permanently remove me from any of their hiring systems and never contact me again
Solution: block emails from @amazon\.(com,co\.uk)\.?
You might not get your purchase information any more. But that's not a problem if you just stop using Amazon. But that also begs the question: why might someone be a customer of Amazon if they don't like their employment practices?
> why might someone be a customer of Amazon if they don't like their employment practices?
The person may not want to work on retail or cloud technology. They don't like the corporate environment. They don't like the work life balance, etc.. It doesn't always reflect their opinion on the overall company. It may in this case, but your confident tone is an odd one to take.
On the one hand, part of me thinks "Yeah but this is corporate employees! This is people like me!".
And then another part of me steps in and asks "So what, the more than a million logistics employees aren't people? They don't count?".
I guess the point is that there are two classes of employees at Amazon. Most of us here on HN aren't used to seeing our class being impacted by job losses.
I mean, not _that_ big a risk. Most people layed off are probably still going to manage to get another job making more than other occupations that never made the "big reward" salaries in the first place.
Agreed. The “risk” here is that you won’t get to stay with the same company your whole life and collect a pension. The “risk” is also that you’ll need to retrain yourself to match the change in the industry. This is different from the expectations that people have for other industries, though job security certainly isn’t what it used to be outside of tech either.
True to some extent. Almost nobody gets to count on staying with the same company their whole life and collecting a pension anymore, though -- so I would not say that expectation exists in other industries anymore. Especially a pension. I don't think anyone outside of government really has pensions anymore.
Re re-training yourself as a software engineer... I wonder how often people really need to do this either... to keep getting top possible salary maybe, but just ("just"!) to keep getting a better salary than most of the USA? Maybe sometimes. But, I mean, there are still people making very very good money writing Fortran and COBOL... probably better money than you can make writing PHP -- and you can still make better money than most of the USA writing PHP! OK if you specialized in, like, Flash or ColdFusion, you probably had to learn something different.
(Now somebody is going to tell me they still make good money writing ColdFusion! Apparently there was a 2021 release with a 2023 release expected, it is still a going concern. I used to get paid to write ColdFusion, like 20 years ago).
I agree with your analysis and your ability to introspect seems rare. That said, when Jeff Bezos looks down upon the Earth from his penis rocket, do you think he sees 2 classes of employee, or do you think that to him, they are a mass of undifferentiated human resources?
Bezos thinking of employees as "human" resources seems pretty generous right now. I'm betting he has switched to calling employees "overhead" and is simply reducing it. Or maybe he likes a different food preparation metaphor and thinks of the trimmed employees as "fat".
Every 10 years or there has recently been a major economic event that impacts the 'programmer classes'. Welcome to the early 2020s one, hopefully it will be over soon. I remember in the dot com crash tons of people left microsoft, did a startup, then came back after it burned. Same in 2008. Now we have the pandemic leading to inflation, then the Ukraine war started, then this likely recession.
So you say statistics needs to be banned because it omits individual tragedies?
An intelligent and empathic enough person can use statistics to inform themselves while also remembering there are individual tragedies.
Statistics is necessary to be able to understand things that are happening around us. Otherwise the information we are getting would be largely meaningless.
Yes and no. These layoffs are limited to corporate employees. IIRC, that’s a third of all employees. Also, this is Amazon and not AWS, as the latter has allegedly decided to up URA targets for 2023.
Good question. I googled, and it may be "unregretted attrition rate," or URA, which represents the percentage of employees that managers aren't sad to see leave the company — whether they part ways voluntarily or otherwise.
Not sure on the accuracy but in a random article it says
The company also has a metric called “unregretted attrition rate” (URA), which represents the percentage of employees it would like to see leave the company – voluntarily or otherwise – in a given year.
> Many more people resign on their own on any given month, most likely.
That’s probably not true, but either way, it’s irrelevant. Voluntarily resigning, most likely with another job already lined up, is not the same as being laid off.
Based on overall headcount, yes, but looking at only corporate headcount the denominator is much bigger. This article was a bit vague and said “stores and human resources divisions.”
You call my view silly, and at the same time you make distinction between corporate and warehouse workers as if these were two separate classes of people presuming firing warehouse workers was not a big deal but corporate is.
Amazon employs 1.5M people total and I don't care if somebody works in a warehouse or an office. They all have their lives to continue and families to feed.
I hate it when manufacturing jobs get cut. I hate it when warehousing jobs get cut. But these numbers do not directly relate to what happens in my field, so in order to understand what happens in my field, these numbers must be considered separately.
I’ll assume you know what I mean and just want to argue lol.
Majority of Amazon workers are essentially blue collar jobs. This primarily affects salaried corporate workers in towers in Seattle etc. So the impact to those types of jobs is clearly more than 1%.
Wasn't the COVID death rate something line 0.1% for the initial alpha strain? Losing a job is not as traumatic as you or your family getting a deadly disease, but the point is that very unpleasant, life disrupting events don't require odds much above infinitesimal to cause real social problems.
Does it surprise you that tech related layoffs would get the attention on a news site related to tech.
Why haven't people talked about the effects of these layoffs on dog-walkers servicing these former employees? They are talking about it on my dogwalking reddit forum.
To be fair, it's unlikely to see many warehouse workers be laid off, because the attrition rate is so high they can just attrit out within months.
The exception would be total warehouse closures, but I don't think we've seen a lot of those because each one is such an enormous capital investment. Though maybe they closed one in response to a union activation effort?
This. Jassy's skills in building AWS does not extend to managing other divisions. I've watched interviews with him and video of the events he's forced to attend, and he projects discomfort and worry.
Bezos surely is concerned, not just for the org and lost growth but his own personal fortune.
These are the 18k already announced. There were two rounds of news about this. First "at least 10k" and then "18k". There was also some news earlier that indicated some some of that number was already informed a couple of months ago, but it's unclear how much.
It's interesting reading all these comments reaching for concepts not quite in peoples vocabularies because they have been stripped out systematically. Its cruel, inhumane, how can they just make a unilateral decision about something I devoted myself to, companies are making billions in profits etc. Marx wrote about all this 150 years ago in great detail.
I was around for a big Microsoft layoff many years ago and it was well communicated internally and empathically. We were given audience (10:1) with directors upon request to ask questions and plead for our fallen. The individuals let go were eulogized with authentic tears by the humans who were given headcount by corporate and then had it taken away. It wasn't the bottom or some biased subset that was culled, but a seemingly random selection across bands to hit a target. (I'm inclined to believe this, given what I saw). We lobbied for our people, and actually got one hired back in a different division that wasn't subject to the layoff.