I have seen three redundancy rounds at different companies.
The first resulted in every engineer in the team taking other jobs within weeks of notice. Quite a few were hired back at 3x their wage as a contractors as the projects while the talent found better pay and conditions and never returned. The company ended up paying more for its least influential engineers but without them it would have been in real trouble.
The second the mere threat caused 10% of the engineers to leave within weeks. Some stuck out the redundencies but clearly management had no clue who the talent was and ended up getting rid of some pretty important people. So the rest left gradually over the next year. The brain drain to competitors was very real, 15 years later they have not recovered and I receive regular calls to do contracts for them to bring some software engineering experience even a decade later, its a bit embarrassing really.
The third ended up getting rid of all the people who run a critical system in one of the UK's largest banks. I saw only the aftermath. All the software guys are long gone and its just full of system operators migrating binaries to more modern hardware, many of those systems are completely unmaintained now and have no team and no one knows where the code is stored, if it is still there. When the bugs started rolling in and management couldn't find a place to get them fixed they started hiring to replace the talent they had made redundent but all of them left within a week because the job was clearly impossible without source code which the company had lost.
I haven't yet seen a redundancy round result in anything but the almost complete exodus of talent and the gutting of a companies prior capability. I stuck around for one of them but I wouldn't do so again because the aftermath was horrible and all the people who made it interesting had left or were leaving. Everytime its been abundantly clear that who goes is mostly random, its not based on anything to do with importance to the company and the people that make the place tick know this.
The first resulted in every engineer in the team taking other jobs within weeks of notice. Quite a few were hired back at 3x their wage as a contractors as the projects while the talent found better pay and conditions and never returned. The company ended up paying more for its least influential engineers but without them it would have been in real trouble.
The second the mere threat caused 10% of the engineers to leave within weeks. Some stuck out the redundencies but clearly management had no clue who the talent was and ended up getting rid of some pretty important people. So the rest left gradually over the next year. The brain drain to competitors was very real, 15 years later they have not recovered and I receive regular calls to do contracts for them to bring some software engineering experience even a decade later, its a bit embarrassing really.
The third ended up getting rid of all the people who run a critical system in one of the UK's largest banks. I saw only the aftermath. All the software guys are long gone and its just full of system operators migrating binaries to more modern hardware, many of those systems are completely unmaintained now and have no team and no one knows where the code is stored, if it is still there. When the bugs started rolling in and management couldn't find a place to get them fixed they started hiring to replace the talent they had made redundent but all of them left within a week because the job was clearly impossible without source code which the company had lost.
I haven't yet seen a redundancy round result in anything but the almost complete exodus of talent and the gutting of a companies prior capability. I stuck around for one of them but I wouldn't do so again because the aftermath was horrible and all the people who made it interesting had left or were leaving. Everytime its been abundantly clear that who goes is mostly random, its not based on anything to do with importance to the company and the people that make the place tick know this.