[ahtihn]

> if I have to choose between firing an EM or a SWE

When does this choice ever come up?

My experience is that most engineers are seen as interchangeable while most EMs aren't.

Only time I've seen EMs fired for economic reasons is when a larger amount of engineers were also laid off.

[Atreiden]

Anecdotally, pretty often. Whenever there is an engineering org failure, whether it be missed deadlines, unreliable software, missed KPIs, etc, there is no such thing as a truly blameless org. Somebody will be accountable in the eyes of leadership, and that boils down to this very choice.

Was it the devs fault for shipping code with a disastrous edge case, or the EMs fault for over- allocating work, resulting in less-refined code and a minimal review process that let the defect slip into production? Just as an example.

[alephnerd]

> When does this choice ever come up

Fairly often, but we usually manage them out so that line-level engineers don't get paranoid and jump ship.

When an EM is suddenly shifted to work on another project, or all you ICs are suddenly talking to other managers or staffed on other projects, that's us as organizations managing out the malcontent and messaging to them that their time is up.