The job I worked at before the one described above was one of the dotcoms that sprung up in the bubble a few years back. The company expaned from 100 employees to 500 emplyess in the span of a year. I was probably one of the last 50 hired. There were getting ready to take the company public at the time only a couple months later the market crashed. They never really had a plan after that and started letting go of people.

The way they generally did it was to let people finish working on the project they were on and then let go of the entire department. There wasn't exactly much reason to work all the hard once you saw that. The harder you worked the sooner your priject would be finished and the sooner you would be out of a job.

The ceo of the company would always send out some positive email about how well things were going just before there were layoff so anytime he said something good you knew it meant you might not be working there the following week. Not exactly great for morale.