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Companies this profitable and large often actually overhire a small degree to deny the competition talent and to give a layer of people that can be laid off to boost profits quickly to make a board think management is good. Google or FB can lay off 5k people and not even NOTICE a change in productivity, but the boards eat it up.

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They might hire to scoop people up, but when they fire, don't they fire based on performance? Or is it purely a random pick?

Some from every column. In larger companies, firing decisions are often political decisions.

Yep, I've been in companies where it's the whole "every department needs to cut" rather than only cutting dead weight.

That's what you, as an engineer would do if you were to do layoffs starting from first principles, but that's not who's doing the layoffs.

This! AWS was doing this in 2017 and 2018.

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