I'm not saying that engineering is necessarily the cost centers at these companies currently experiencing major layoffs (though the high salaries probably don't help), but it does call into question how much software being written is actually beneficial to these businesses, if they're able to shed engineers just like that.
The reason why these two companies are having major layoffs is because they are in the travel sector and COVID is a custom made disaster for any company in the travel sector. I think they are hurting themselves in the long run, but they are choosing long term survival and cutting of new incomplete initiatives for the more well proven cash cows, which hurts their future.
Also software in many companies managing large complicated multibillion business are a bit of an iceberg. There is a lot of internal software that you are not exposed to as an end user customer. I call it the google search effect. Why so many servers and engineers for a 2 page website?!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22809778
I'm not saying that engineering is necessarily the cost centers at these companies currently experiencing major layoffs (though the high salaries probably don't help), but it does call into question how much software being written is actually beneficial to these businesses, if they're able to shed engineers just like that.