[rolisz]

Eh, not always. Sometimes it's truly random. For example, at one of the recent Google layoffs, they fired a guy who was oncall. He just woke up and didn't have access to his email anymore, even though he was supposed to be responsible and react to any issues in some service.

[paxys]

Layoffs and PIPs are very different. The former is random, or at least the decision is made at the top of the organization by someone who probably doesn't know who you are. The latter is about your specific performance.

[zarathustreal]

Yep, same thing happened to us at AWS. Sometimes it’s actually random.