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It will eliminate some particular employees, the roles may be retained and filled with other, probably—for it to have a business purpose—lower-cost (either because of location or experience or a combination) personnel.

Or, even more cynically, the roles can be nominally retained but due to inability to find the right talent or something like that kept open through the current (outside of AI, for now) economic downturn, and then filled again later.

It’s not doublespeak. Multiple people can share the same role. Downsizing reduces redundancy. The number of roles can remain the same even with a smaller headcount.

Employees are also a liability. The entire HR department exists to manage this.

and who manages the HR department employees? not being facetious, Ive wondered this for a while now. seems like they have almost unchecked power to run a corp into the ground.

If a company is the Soviet Union and the CEO is Stalin, HR would be the NKVD. How did Stalin keep the NKVD in line? They were also being murdered themselves while filling their murder quotas.