Bonuses have to be paid out on or by March 15th for tax and accounting reasons. A lot of bonuses require employees to still be employed as of the date of payme

Bonuses have to be paid out on or by March 15th for tax and accounting reasons. A lot of bonuses require employees to still be employed as of the date of payment, so a lot of companies fire employees in February or early March (after bonus amounts have been determined) so that they don't have to make those payments. This is why so many game studios fire employees in the Spring (see, for example, the last several years of video game layoffs all heavily concentrated in the first 3 months of the year). More insidiously, at some companies, the executives redirect the bonuses that would have gone to the laid-off employees toward themselves. That's fairly rare but it does happen, especially with game studios based out of a certain part of the world.