[gitfan86]

There are a lot of people high up in large organizations that do not care if the company loses individuals with high output and high skills. All they care about is making themselves look good and get promoted. So yes, if they can get a list of 10k people to fire together very quickly that may make them look good even if that list has no rhyme or reason to it.

But also there are people who are just barely productive enough to not get fired at these companies. Layoffs are a great time to get rid of them without going through all the effort of documenting that they are just barely not doing enough to keep the job. Large companies are afraid to fire people without good documentation of the person doing a bad job or something wrong because they could be sued for wrongful termination.