[iigs]

This actually happens a lot at Microsoft; the reason why it's unheard of is they're normally hiring more people than they're RIFing. The Microsoft reorg 30 day job search is a way of life for people in some disciplines and teams there.

Much like high level programming can "waste" large numbers of clock cycles, cutting huge orgs while hiring other ones certainly doesn't seem efficient, and is especially grating given that we're talking about livelihoods, not zeros and ones. Unfortunately I don't think anyone has come up with a paradigm that works a lot better than this, although I'd be curious to hear of any large successes.

After a few years on the payrolls of mega-corp, you get replaced [...] Perhaps it's inevitable with a competitive labor market...

Yeah, it was a feature when many of us were getting in during high-school, but it sucks as an incumbent. I guess the takeaway is to stay hungry.