Your comment assumes it was a bad decision at the time, or that they might make bad future decisions that a new person would not.
It is entirely possible when budgets were available certain initiative made sense to fund. If budgets dry up you start cutting the least harmful thing even if it was still a good idea. It may just not be better than the thing over here that is more profitable or cost effective.
The higher up the ladder you go, the more important your skill of "foresight" is.
If the hiring decisions are made on simple heuristics such as budget in so hire more, budget gone so fire more - it's not surprising that most engineers don't like their managers, which was my original post.
We can argue all day long about what management could have done but ultimately the bad decision was made by the management chain, not by the employee. In a fairer system, the expectation is that the bad decision makers go first.
> Notice how the vast majority of workers laid off will not be the same managers who made those bad choices.
You've been working off these assumptions -- that low-level people will be fired first, and that some group of people clearly made "bad decisions" -- since your original comment, and keep repeating them in some form in all subsequent comments, without a single shred of evidence for either.
They are getting rid of 200 people, not very many at Wal-Mart's size, and are still hiring in multiple key areas. Maybe they just decided, with business contracting, it was the right time to eliminate the slackers, the less-skilled, the I'd-never-shop-at-Wal-Marts, the morale-draggers.
> the more important your skill of "foresight" is
Nobody foresaw a global pandemic shutting down economies and freezing major trade routes from Asia, to be followed by massive inflation and huge increases in borrowing costs.
It is entirely possible when budgets were available certain initiative made sense to fund. If budgets dry up you start cutting the least harmful thing even if it was still a good idea. It may just not be better than the thing over here that is more profitable or cost effective.