[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.