I started my first job after college in 2007, in a DoD engineering firm, at the peak of military spending. When I was hired, I think we were up to 650 people at our location, plus we had contractors helping us because we had so much work. We kept hiring until we were at 750 or so, we had to rent other space for people. Then the market crashed, then the military budget got cut, then we started to hurt.
If my counting is correct, I made it through 11 layoffs, when I left in 2013, we were down to around 100 employees. There were a couple that I didn't find out about until days after, so I may have miscounted somewhere. As a government contractor, we had rules to follow or there was some penalty, we could only lay off X% of people and had to wait 3 months between layoffs. So 3 months after the previous layoff, people would start checking the conference room schedules. They always did layoffs on the same day of the week (Friday I think), and would book most of the conference rooms for it. The layoffs blur together now, so I may have a few things out of chronological order.
Except for my last 4 months there, I was always crazy busy, but I was working on IR&D, which employed fewer people. A few of the times we had layoffs, I worked 60+ hours that week. As far as I know, we sold hardly anything from IR&D, but everything management had us work on worked well. They just never realized no one would pay the prices they wanted.
When the layoffs started, lots of people were working "direct on indirect." Which was basically paid to sit there. I think they let ~100 people go the first time, and everyone let go had been on direct on indirect. So since no one wanted to be let go, everyone remaining on direct on indirect found some manager to get them on a normal code.
A couple months of this, and every project was over budget. Another RIF and managers were told not to do this anymore. Up to this point it had mostly been worker bees, almost no management had been cut.
After a couple RIFs, some people realized that the safest place wasn't on a project, but on general Indirect. So they got promoted. Lots of new nifty named positions opened up, and they spent their day in meetings. So as the RIFs progressed, we became top heavy. And more of my time was in meetings instead of doing work, so that these people could be "productive."
Eventually, management started getting cut, and it was safer as a worker bee than management. For every supervisor, there was now about 2 worker bees, and then there are all these new Indirect positions. It seemed like for every worker bee there was a non-worker bee. Our local president got cut, groups got consolidated. And with every RIF, we knew we weren't in good waters, so we were all looking for new jobs, even after the last worker bee got RIFed, many more were leaving on their own. It kept getting more and more top heavy.
Over time, the rented space got cleaned out. The cramped space we had got more and more roomy. I was in a cube farm that originally had ~40 engineers. When I left there were 2 or 3 of us. They rented out space to another company. Then after I left they moved to a smaller space.
I think it was before the first RIF, or maybe it was between the first and the second, but management asked if anyone was willing to go to part time to help our the team. EVERY one of the people who volunteered for it were RIFed in the next one.
It was a very gloomy place after a while. Boxes would show up and mean another one was happening. Then when they tried to consolidate space, they'd put the same boxes around, so we could move. Everyone thought another RIF was coming, no one told us it was any different. Two Fridays went by, before someone asked about the boxes. Evidently the realized everyone feared the boxes, so they stopped putting them out before the RIF, so the next one was a surprise.
A sad story about one specific RIF. One of my coworkers was on some kind of medication for some mental infliction. None of us knew it. She picked the day to come off her meds a few days before she got RIFed. She went home and grabbed a knife and tried to kill her husband and kids. Her husband protected them, but got cut up, and she left. He called the police and our company, and we had police around the campus all day thinking she might come and attack someone. Once they caught her, she was put in a mental institution. To do an assessment, they had to completely get her off her drugs, which took a few weeks I believe. The story goes, during her evaluation, she got so agitated, she bit off her own finger. I didn't really know her very well, but on her meds you would never had guessed it. To go from one place to the other is scary.
More RIFs have happened since I left. I even heard recently, they were offering buyouts for long time employees. I don't talk to anyone working there anymore, so everything I hear now is second or third hand.