It was amazing how much great talent and know-how walked out the door with fat packages in '09 and '11. Every of good senior engineer and product manager that I knew landed jobs before the ER kicked in, took a couple of weeks off, and hit the ground running to JNPR, FIRE, GOOG, etc
It was absolutely one of the dumbest moves I've ever seen a company make in terms of losing culture, lore, knowledge, and talent. I've always assumed this we an effort to lower the company "age" profile with the mistaken belief that more "innovation" would come from younger talent. It could not gave been for cutting out high cost employee's as most senior talent had been "capped and trapped" for years with no raises or promotions.
What rubbish....
If they truly believed it bring innovation, they would not have line the pockets of MPLS (where some of the folks who took ER's went, and come back.)