I worked in a factory for a few months as a temp and a bunch of my co-workers that had been with the company for years had this exact thing happen to them, a few years after the 2008 crash. I believe it was a little different in that people were asked to take the change in their classification or leave, rather than being let go and then hired back separately. I know engineers that work outside of software that had to take mandatory unpaid time for the same reasons. I guess we just need to hope we end up with that "soft-ish" landing the Fed was talking about instead of a big recession or we're going to hear a lot more stories like this.