[mittermayr]

There's rarely any talk about how many of these (if any!) are actually contractors / vendors. All the big companies have outsourced a huge number of staff to agencies (presumably to be more flexible in short-term budgeting and "turning the resource off", when needed, so they don't have to worry about the legal intricacies, as that is by-design conveniently also outsourced to the vendor in most cases). Curious if the 18k here is on top of shutting down external contracts.

[sriram_sun]

Contract jobs are never part of layoffs.

OTOH, not all full time roles have an actual human assigned. They could also be budgeted for, but not filled yet. Post 2008, managers usually kept a couple of unfilled roles for events like this.

[flandish]

Interesting take. Can we consider contract labor a “layoff”? Wouldn’t they try to “look better” (like they are not laying off) by not considering “closed contract” not the same as “layoff”?

Wouldn’t the contracted firm be doing the layoff not the tech comp?

Interesting take!