[ecdavis]

> In my personal experience, whenever anything like this happened, there would be layoffs within a year.

A few months before Microsoft laid off 18,000 people in 2014 my team and I sat in an all hands meeting for our group (or division, or whatever it was called). The merging of the SDET and SDE career paths was explained, accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation. The presentation contained a slide which had as its only content something like, "No jobs will be lost," in bold, red, all-caps font on a white background. Over the following weeks, several SDETs who worked closely with my team found SDE positions in other parts of the company. Sure enough, come July, thousands of SDETs were laid off.[0]

That slide is burned into my memory, and I often wonder if it was a warning from management who knew what was coming but were not permitted to say.

[0] Many would later be hired back, but that's another story.