[mik3y]

No, I didn’t mean it that way or in reference to a specific company - although I can see how it read that way! Your comment made me laugh.

The point was more that layoffs can take out big slugs of staff without considering the individual, in a few different ways: initiatives we can just cancel completely (self driving cars); people we will likely need later but less in the shorter term (recruiting); or places where we consciously take on added risk (losing security).

I do think that for the company that sacked their security team, the executives may very well have had a full understanding of the risks it created — but couldn’t easily say so publicly (“we chose to 10x our risk of a security incident, so we keep 1 more product initiative staffed which might save us”). Just speculation. Not a situation I think many of us would be comfortable in.