yep, altho i will caveat we've basically never seen how mature FAANG act in a recession, given the long growth we've had since before they become the megacorps they are today.
but its a near certainty if FAANG is laying off folks then the smaller co's will be bleeding heavier. so the ordinal ranking of impact holds.
also i expect ex-FAANG folks have an easier go of picking up contract/freelance work given the multiple agencies focused on connecting ex-FAANG devs.
every company of more than about 100 people has some dead weight. Often, low level managers know who they are. In good times, it might not be worth doing anything much about it. In bad times, the rest-and-vesters are out.
Well... at a well-run company, it works that way. At a less-well-run company, they instead squeeze everyone with more work and more hours and less benefits and no raises, figuring that some folks will leave and do the downsizing for them. This is a losing strategy, though, because you lose the best people first that way.
It was an hourly position, but they started doing 'required' overtime; 66 hours a week for an hourly person was still 'cheaper' than hiring another person.
And yeah. As a result we had a whole team did 50-60 hour work weeks for 17-23$/hr (lol, being paid 23$ an hour to do C#, LISP, entry level Oracle and SQL server DBA alongside drafting.) Physical and mental health injuries happened across the team.
They also took away our holiday pay, and changed the PTO structure so that 1st year employees didn't even have enough PTO to cover being paid for the holidays.
Yes, they lost most of their good people. I was among the first wave to go when the economy in my area started picking back up (We didn't really start to recover here till 2012-2013.)
At Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix, the dead weight proactively get PIP'd and fired all of the time (Facebook cuts the bottom 10% every six months). From the Netflix culture note:
> We have no bell curves or rankings or quotas such as “cut the bottom 10% every year.” That would be detrimental to fostering collaboration, and is a simplistic, rules-based approach we would never support. We focus on managers’ judgment through the “keeper test” for each of their people: if one of the members of the team was thinking of leaving for another firm, would the manager try hard to keep them from leaving? Those who do not pass the keeper test (i.e. their manager would not fight to keep them) are promptly and respectfully given a generous severance package so we can find someone for that position that makes us an even better dream team
not FAANG but this is also my experience with large companies in automotive, NEV's and even banking. There is almost always a hiring stop followed by a huge ramp-up in outsourcing.
Existing ongoing projects still need to be delivered and are usually chronically understaffed so the hiring stop adds even more pressure and gives the justification for bringing in consultants.
The whole thing usually plays out like this: investor meeting where cost cutting is a top priority. Agreement to slash all permanent hiring budgets and put new hiring plans on hold. This cascades down the chain with engineering departments revising their projections and raising alarm about risks to not meeting deadlines for existing projects. Budget gets approved for onboarding freelancers.