I think there's a shared responsibility here by both employer and employee to ensure long term employment. This is not to negate your points, because I think yo

I think there's a shared responsibility here by both employer and employee to ensure long term employment. This is not to negate your points, because I think your points are definitely valid and the company going full-steam ahead is absolutely reckless. Having been laid off a couple of times during the great recession era, I never ever take a job without first analyzing the likelihood of a layoff to occur and how it would impact my role. I have a list of interview questions I ask potential employers and the bulk of it is around how they handled lay-offs in the past and how they will handle them in the future. I ask about cash reserves for such situations and I ask about how they handle growth. Asking these things will give you some idea of the shit show that will appear sooner or later. You're right; market conditions are unpredictable and there's so much speculation that it's difficult to gauge where things will go in 2-5 years, so you should always plan for an economic down-turn scenario regardless of how rosy things look at the time of employment. All of that being said, this is still a relatively solid lay-off plan and I think the bashing is a bit on the harsh side considering the outcome here. Nowhere is safe right now and if you think it is, you're going to have a bad time.