Yeah, where I live (NL), it's required to be something like "group people into roles, then let people go in reverse order of seniority (i.e. LIFO) within those roles."

This is refreshingly pragmatic. I guess I shouldn't expect anything less from that part of the world.

Isn’t last in first out ageist?

It's slightly more complicated in NL than just last in first out, for larger amounts like Spotify is doing here. Apart from grouping by role, there is also a requirement to ensure the distribution of workers across age groups remains as similar as possible after the reduction compared to before.

Age groups in this case are 10-year buckets, 15-25, 25-35 etc. So if a role has for example 40% of the workers in 25-35, 20% in 35-45, 20% in 45-55 and 20% in 55+ then after the reduction it still has to be as close as possible to that distribution. So it's not like all of the younger workers that are "last in" in their early 20s would be fired, it would be similar numbers across each age group, within each group it's the last hired.

LIFO sounds like it’s based on hitting order, not worker’s age.

Surely, a law would not be needed to tell a business to terminate based on hitting order.

It's the same approach in Sweden.