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Notes -
I don't want to give away too many details for opsec reasons.
However, the broad strokes are that I worked at a big company you've heard of. One day the top brass decided that the company has gotten too big and it's time to downsize. Naturally, top brass has no visibility into what parts of the company are load bearing and which are not, they can only tell which parts are cost centers and which are profit centers. So inevitably they lay off large portions of a few teams that are maintaining tooling that nearly every other (productive) employee at the company depends on to do their work.
The company hasn't gone out of business (yet), but there was absolutely a huge productivity hit for me because that tooling was no longer reliable and I needed to work around it somehow. Multiply that out by tens of thousands of employees and you can imagine the scale I'm talking about here.
In my department as well they laid off some of the top guys that were universally admired (and I'm not talking management, I'm talking about guys at the coalface). Meanwhile I was aware of people in other departments who accomplished as much in a quarter as I accomplished in a week (and I am not a particularly productive employee). They kept their jobs, because their bosses liked them and their poor performance was never a matter of record.
Of course, this is all perfectly illegible to the brass. From their perspective, they saved a bunch of cash - mission accomplished!
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