[occamsrazorwit]

True, there are some very dysfunctional cases. In general though, if a manager disagrees strongly enough, they can protect their reports. Yes, it might impact their personal career, but it's weird to criticize HR for just following orders and not apply the same criticisms to the manager (something I'm seeing a lot of in these discussions). The manager is much more familiar with the laid-off employee, their work, and the criteria used to judge them. Ultimately, the manager has much more final say than HR people who are essentially just messengers to shield management.

[bb88]

I'm more inclined to believe management is dysfunctional more than it's actually functional. The real question is how dysfunctional is it?

I realize this is a cynical take, but management is largely about power and control than it is about furthering the business. RTO is a great example of this.

Here are some examples I've encountered over the years.

One manager used her directs as a dating pool.

Another one purposely hired a bad engineer because of stack ranking so they could protect the good engineers.