[PheonixPharts]

> bottom 10-25% of performers

I've been around awhile and seen plenty of layoffs, layoffs are almost never about performance at the individual level.

It's nice to believe they are because in times like these thinking to yourself "I'm a least in the top half of performers" can give the illusion that you're safe. However, this thinking is ultimately harmful because when you or your friends and colleagues do get laid off you will continue this thinking and considering it a valuation of your self worth, or the worth of colleagues you respect.

[mandelbrotwurst]

They're not primarily about individual performance, but if a company decides to cut X% of some group, it's going to make an effort to cut those it can most afford to lose, which is going to tend toward those they evaluate as lower performers, accurately or not.

[ruffrey]

I’ve recently seen this, but still performance was not the driver. A small company had two teams, a data eng team and a cloud products team. Both very high performing. The economic tide turned and they needed to cut % headcount to survive. Instead of cutting from both teams, they cut the cloud products team and put the idea on hold. This kept the long term play on data intact. They’ll hire full stack later. Yes they could afford to lose people, but not due to individual performance.

[parkingrift]

The differentiation here is that these layoffs are not for urgent financial reasons. This is similar to the recently announced Tesla layoffs.

You don’t lay-off 10% of your work force without need, and you don’t do it at random.