I use to work in HR for a medium sized, publicly traded company. Here's how it works:

Wall Street banks set quarterly profit targets for companies. If the companies hit the target, stock goes up, if they don't it goes down.

If stock goes down too much, C-suite is usually fired. This is what motivates them.

There is usually a few weeks between when the company calculates it's quarterly numbers and when they are legally obligated to report them.

If the profits aren't up to the Wall Street calculation, the C-suite panics and 95% of the time will go on a firing spree so when the numbers do become public they can claim they analyzed the company and magically found it was overstaffed, and already took care of the "problem". This is an attempt to save their own jobs.

In truth they did the firings in such a hurry nothing was seriously looked at, no significant problems were discovered, and the employees let go were closer to random than carefully selected based on performance and need. This happens every quarter all across America. It's rare the Wall Street targets are scrutinized. Often the companies were actually profitable too, just not as profitable as Wall Street wanted them to be.

The human factor is entirely removed at this point. Most people who were fired were perfectly good at their job, and their job was just as relevant as any other. Some analyst on a spreadsheet just calculated how many people from each team would be fired to appease shareholder feelings. It was sad to watch people take it so personally and blame themselves when it had nothing to do with them or their performance. Just a corporate wheel turning around. Many would also be rehired within months too.

Once we go higher up, it's mostly intuition based a d not at all based on data - is what I've come to understand. So whatever the higher ups feel is what gets done. And they won't take any hit because they already have all the savings they may need. They will switch jobs before things come crashing down. All they want to show is a slight uptick in sales or revenue to take credit.

Ah yes, the good ol' product ownership.

I once built a product from scratch, put my heart and soul into it, watched it grew from pretty much nothing to a full-featured thing. It almost got canceled a few times, but I fought nail and tooth each time (my some colleagues' help) to keep the development running.

At some point, we hit a whale, a high profile one, that is. Our sales was working them for at least a couple years. My boss even pitched in, lowering the price more than we would've just to get the project going.

Yet, I had to pretty much had to make it work by myself, with some part-time help from colleagues who's doing other projects. The whole development team (which includes this colleagues) were running on skeleton crew.

I asked my boss to recruit some more people, but he refused, due to budget. At some point we ran into an issue that I couldn't solve. Weeks went by with our product pretty much being unusable. The whale were losing trust in us every moment, but there's nothing I could do. The first solution my boss could come up with: for me to try and ask around and find a friend who could help me.

Finally my boss caved in and asked some freelance with whom he had worked with previously. We were able to come up with a working solution, but by then, the whale had lost too much trust. One of the top brass there even told us straight up that it's pointless. This was after we deployed our solution.

As the project was crumbling beneath our feet, I was able to find a new job and got out of that company. Later of, I heard that this project got terminated.

Although I was somewhat bummed, I was also relieved I wasn't there by the time shit hit the fan. That thing was my baby, but whatever. Now I got paid much more for doing less work that I did.

If I'm going to be honest movements like that seems to be money laundering.

1 keep the staff moving

2 no one can really tell if a name in the paycheck is a real person or no(if forged right)

3 you can say you hired 300 people or something, and then fired them. Keep doing this in a cycle.(mass fire and contractvis usefull to not know who is real and who is a forgery unless under scrutiny.

4 yhe that feels like the money removing part of the operation, from the legal to the less legal channels.

laid off while on vacation

Oh screw that. I had that happen while I was on a church trip on my first job. They also said I would be better in a job like mcd's where I was standing still at a register. Jokes on them I can't do any of those jobs anymore bc of my audhd and all that goes with it. The meltdowns, anxiety/panic attacks, and generally uneducated people on my conditions that refuse to learn are awful....