I think that your best employees are the people who are most likely to leave a company of their own accord, and so if you rely on attrition to reduce headcount you will also reduce the average quality of your workers.
In the tech industry the best employees are going to leave regardless, especially if they're bored.
Also, like banks, the FAANGs pay bonuses. And also like banks, if you want to 'suggest' to someone that ought to leave, regardless of who they are, you pay them a near-zero bonus, and give them a negative annual review as well.
Conversely, if a company wants to keep someone they pay more to encourage that person to stay.
All the gears and levers are in place in Megacorp, to do this kind of thing.
The whole mass-redundancy thing from companies of this size I find distasteful and cowardly, a reflection of the disrepect and arrogance senior management has for it staff, and an indication of mismanagement at a high level that can be afforded because a company is too large to fail.
I'm not saying that it's good to fire people. And yes, companies have levers to retain their strongest staff. I'm not convinced that they tend to be very good at doing that though.
The (non-FAANG) company I work for has an on-going hiring freeze, and I'm actually quite concerned because the only people who are leaving are the people you wouldn't want to leave - and none of the people you would want to leave are doing so.
