Semi-retired Silicon Valley Engineer here. I worked for a large mainframe computer maker who was the biggest competitor to big blue. The company started to slide before being completely bought out by a major Japanese electronics maker. Before that happened they bought a “supercomputing” company for the tech. They offered new challenging positions there for employees to transfer. This included the entire chip design team (about 20 people). Then after a couple of months later, the company laid off everyone at that division. Yeah, I wondered what was going on when you lure the best and brightest to a new division, then axe that division seemed like the corporate equivalent of putting a pistol in your mouth. The beautiful part of this is that chip design group decides to market itself as a group, rather than each looking for new work. They got “bought” with the most junior member getting $20K signing bonus. The original employer tried to rescind the lay off of these employees as they realized they could have sold them as well. The employees gave them the one finger salute. I left with the first “package” offered. By the way: When employers start to offer severance packages, the first package is always the best, they get worse as the company spirals down.