I strongly doubt seniority was considered (neither from the legal perspective nor based on what I onserved myself), so idk what the grandparent is talking about

I strongly doubt seniority was considered (neither from the legal perspective nor based on what I onserved myself), so idk what the grandparent is talking about. Anecdata: out of 3 people laid off on my team, all 3 were mid-level engineers. The only senior engineer on the team wasn't affected. The other two people remaining on the team (which includes me) are also mid-level engineers. As far as I can see, the layoffs were randomized on individual level, but more targeted on the higher level. E.g., "division ABC of org XYZ could use a cut, let's randomly pick N people from this group of M teams". That's just a speculation though.