[andy_ppp]

"But...how hard is it to cut it down to real bare-bones staff"

I'm sure you'd lay off the right people but it's much much more difficult than you think because everyone appears to be doing stuff. Let's say 3/4 people need to go - reviewing that individually is a nightmare for morale and very time consuming.

It also never seems to happen - instead companies take the easier road and keep doing a small minimal amount of layoffs because the big one is almost impossible and might lead to whole pieces of the site stopping working.

[smileysteve]

Even if you layoff the right people, morale of the others is going to suffer and you're likely to lose 10%+ of them too.