I worked for a company at one point where there was two teams. One team was maintaining the company's main product which was consistently making positive returns to the company year after year. The second team was working on green field projects whose value was entirely speculative. I started on team two, and quickly switched to team one.
After a year when the layoffs came, which team got cut?
I've also seen the opposite of your scenario where a company (almost blindly) cuts staff, including IT/Engineering, and lets go of some of the very key people (sometimes the ONLY people) who have any intricate knowledge of the system in order to maintain it and get caught in all kinds of problems.
In one case, I walked into a team that was maintaining a component and they had to claw back the actual laptop from the guy that left and attempt to dig up uncommitted source code that was need to maintain the system.