Hundreds of staff at Macquarie Group received their notice yesterday and are expected to clear their desks by today. Most of yesterday's job cuts appear to apply to Macquarie Capital and to be mainly in Australia. There are also reports (in the Financial Review) of cuts to staffing in Asia of around 10 per cent.There are, or were, also recently significant redundancies at many of the bank's larger, offshore offices including Tokyo, Seoul, London and various offices in North America.The extensive nature of the job cuts points to a change in management philosophy at Macquarie. Rather than leaving the hiring and firing decisions to executives running each business unit, and informed by their own business plans, the wider impact of the job cuts suggests the group executive is setting some head-count targets.How many staff got the pink slip yesterday is unclear. Estimates vary from 200 (reported by the Sydney Morning Herald) to between 500 and 1000 (reported by the Financial Review).Taking into account the progressive termination of staff over a number of months, various newspapers estimate the aggregate of recent job cuts at more than 700 (in The Age) to in excess of 1000 (in the SMH).Macquarie's staffing complement appears to have peaked at close to 14,000 early this year.The Herald Sun speculated the group was targeting a head count reduction of around 5000 positions, a goal only achievable by selling business units. Macquarie acquired many diverse but niche advisory and financing businesses over the later years of the long boom, mainly in Europe and North America, and established numerous joint ventures with partners in Asia and Africa.