Yeah, that's what it sounds like to us. She had been there about 6 years.

I sometimes just wake up randomly in the middle of the night and use the restroom and check my email in the process. I know it’s dumb but I feel like punishing myself.

It sounds like their job was pretty toxic and pushing through their work-life boundary. (This has happened to me before).

When that happens regularly, and you get used to being woken up in the middle of the night to respond to a technical outage or needy management, the lightest phone buzz can shock you awake.

Given the described situation, I'm not surprised they woke up to an unexpected phone notification :(

She woke up at a normal hour and saw an email from 3 AM. "Woke up to find a notification on her phone", not "woken up by a notification on her phone".

I read it as “woke up at <some arbitrary, unspecified time> to an email which was sent at 3:16AM.”

Perhaps I phrased that wrong.

When we woke up at (roughly at 6:30), she saw a work email on her phone announcing the layoffs.

99% literally use literally wrong though.

Really? I see that word used correctly more often than not, but I guess it depends on what projects you work with.

It’s a bit more ironic than that —- at least according to to Wikipedia, they drew lots (I.e randomly) for the individual who was killed.

Not necessarily. Cowardice is a viable individual survival strategy.

In that kind of setting I imagine the low performers would sometimes be likeliest to survive, if they broke rank to run away. I imagine the lots would come out if everyone gave an honest effort.

That's not how the legions worked. The men assembled three ranks deep. The first rank was comprised of those with middling experience, who had seen combat before. The rear rank was the senior veterans. The cherries with no experience went in the middle, both to be reassured by the E4 mafia laying skunion in the front rank, and to be prodded on by the very experienced guys behind them.