Anecdote: I work for a mid-size (~5000 employees) non-SV software company (heavily focused on a particular industry). We have been steadily laying people off quietly. But almost no software engineers. At this point it's the usual -- QA, project managers, enterprise architects, things like that. Management likes to pretend they're basically useless, they're somewhat expensive, and it looks like an easy win to cut that out. But so far, developers are untouchable.

My theory around this is that they don't want to give competitors an edge or allow room for devs to go build a competing product.

Do you get the sense it’s for profit padding or is there a downturn in business? If there is a downturn in business, is that downturn related to Covid measures at the consumer or business level?

I work for a smaller company (< 200 employees) and it's similar. We are still hiring additional engineers but we've let go some project people as well as our scrum masters. Scrum masters at least do feel like they don't justify their salary to me really, it isn't as if the team leads don't have to be in all the meetings they run so may as well have the team leads run them

Naively, the category seems to be "high growth tech". So that includes both the SV megacorps and startups (which are also concentrated in the Bay Area).