I'm curious how the mass layoffs play out when the large tech outfits find themselves needing to fill difficult positions. My expectation, unfortunately, is th

I'm curious how the mass layoffs play out when the large tech outfits find themselves needing to fill difficult positions. My expectation, unfortunately, is that for the biggest players it won't be much more than "we have to pay more for talent to be willing to work for us." However, for some it may play out as it did for the survivors of the early-00s dot-com bust. I know of one company, in particular, that narrowly avoided bankruptcy by laying off about half of their staff. They did this in the ugliest way possible (at the time) ... having people sent to rooms to receive either "you're safe/new job" letters or have their badges taken from them and walked -- en mass -- out the door after an apology speech delivered via video. Unfortunately, this company was located in a market that even in the worst economic times never broke 1% unemployment for devs/engineers. When the need to expand/fix what fell apart came, they found it impossible to hire mid-level and above programming and support positions[0]. After discovering an unusually low number of referrals (despite large bonuses offered) for programmers, they polled staff and found that the issue was the reputation of the company among the staff's professional network... and being a (still) large employer in the area, that represented the overall reputation of job-seekers in the area[1]. The company I worked for (or, at least, the company that we merged with) had a similar problem, though had a much larger pool of engineering talent to pull from (and I'm not sure they ever did "door #1/door #2" style lay-offs). It was a big problem for them for a few years, but was managed by increasing offers and accepting less qualified candidates (which are realities for large businesses with a lot of bureaucracy, anyway). [0] I know of several cases where they paid employees to move across the country in order to fill needed positions. It was always puzzling to me why they didn't just hire remotely, but they had a reasonably centralized operation. [1] My buddy continued working there after they laid off most of his coworkers; apparently the environment improved, dramatically, about two years later but the hiring problem persisted until he left a decade later. I suspect it's better by now. I don't even know if the company has the same name.