Good question. Best guess: Everybody else is firing 10% of staff, so fewer questions asked.

I forget where I heard this, but someone put it this way: to the markets, 10% is a positive signal that a company is cutting some cruft, but 25% is a negative signal that a company is in trouble.

After the first dotcom boom I survived two layoff waves of 7%, about 6 months apart. Our branch wasn't loosing money but every office had to report enough employees to headquarters so the 7% can be met because that's the number that was used in the press release and earnings call. As others wrote at the same time company was still hiring (at least engineers) and some marketing positions just moved to an agency which then billed us per hour for the same person.

It’s generally accepted sacrifice to the volcano gods. It’s pretty hard to fuck up the company with a 10% cut, and the investors like it.

An excuse to use the word "decimated".