I worked at one place that would frequently do "hiring freeze, consultants only!" thing followed by "fire all the consultants, FTEs only!" thing every other yea

I worked at one place that would frequently do "hiring freeze, consultants only!" thing followed by "fire all the consultants, FTEs only!" thing every other year. Clearly some OpEx/CapEx budget arb. Also would do incredible things like mandate firm wide sending all consultants home for rest of year in early/mid December to save 3-4% lol. Did this at least twice in 5 years. One year there was a fairly large failed projects with a dozen senior devs and they had nothing to do but also weren't fired because "we don't have budget for severance". This was in July. Guys started showing up to work in sandals and baseball caps. This was all at a bank with over 100k employees.