[speby]

The statement was about getting a promotion, not about avoiding a layoff.

I've also seen the opposite of your scenario where a company (almost blindly) cuts staff, including IT/Engineering, and lets go of some of the very key people (sometimes the ONLY people) who have any intricate knowledge of the system in order to maintain it and get caught in all kinds of problems.

In one case, I walked into a team that was maintaining a component and they had to claw back the actual laptop from the guy that left and attempt to dig up uncommitted source code that was need to maintain the system.