You can believe whatever conspiracy theories you want, of course, but the most straightforward explanation is that when you lay off X,000 or XX,000 people, some number of them will be on leave.
And my CTO insists that PR count isn't a performance metric. But guess what number gets used the minute people are forced to stack rank (of course they don't call it that, but... that's basically what it is)?
Do you have any source for this at all? I’ve seen so many different exonerations for Meta’s layoff criteria including claims that engineers using the most AI were laid off because Meta had them build AI tools to replace themselves.
Everyone is oddly confident despite all of the conflicting explanations.
Without any evidence, I would be shocked if performance rating wasn't a factor in the layoffs. But performance rating is not the same thing as AI tool use.