They can hire or fire however they want. That's just business. But if a company posts a 10 billion dollar net income on an earnings call and also wants to pretend that they can no longer afford to pay 200 workers (which, even if they all averaged 200k comes own to 40m dollars, or less than half a percent of said net income), I'm not going to buy it.
I don't see a way to spin that, so I'd rather they be straight with me. Product X isn't make enough money to justify costs of labor, we are cutting expenses to it. Goodbye.
Amazon tends to have good severance so I'm not actually terrified of the engineers going homeless on the streets, but it's more of the way everything is done. You tend to get zero notice for it, you're cut off immediately from all your chats and emails, and you go through the normal charade with recruiters ready to talk about how sorry they feel just as their own studio laid off the last month. You're basically treated as a criminal that needs to be cut off ASAP despite providing value for months/years and you go back to more false platitudes and the usual annoying interview rituals where you pretend you totally care about the company and need to be humble about salary despite that being a big reason (or maybe only reason) you even looked at them.
I'm just tired of all the fakeness.