Technology

Yes, this is a tactic used by lots of the large software companies when they want to raise the bottom lines, and phase out an aging workforce because saying the word "layoffs" affects share price. It also helps to reduce the salary demands of any incoming workers to replace the outgoing, because the baseline gets reset without having to justify why profits are high, but workers won't be getting any of that (previous position at 75% premium, but incoming at 25% less than scale).

An example with Google in 2021-2022: tell all your middle-managers they'll need to do something unreasonable like relocate to keep their job, wait for some to leave, then put the rest on PIPs and promise their underlings they can apply for the soon-to-be vacant role if they keep up the good work. Effectively, Google only had to publicly acknowledge firing 12,000 employees, when closer to 20,000 were displaced for various reasons. It's a shitty shell game to keep the share price high, and force people who stick around to do more work for less money.