> I wonder why meta would choose to cut this cost and not some other. For example, why not lay off 20 engineers?

It’s likely that meta sees less issue with removing janitors than engineers. One question they probably asked themselves is: would those missing janitors have any impact on any project or revenue stream ? Would it be hard ton re-hire and re-train them if we need to ?

With engineers, they would probably have to answer « yes » to the impact question and « no » to the re-staff question, while it is really hard to even notice few missing janitors and re-hiring them is trivial.