A couple of coworkers with experience in the defense industry related a story about a company, Cubic I think, which started offering buyouts in order to reduce headcount and boost profits. The best engineers took the offer because they could just get another job somewhere else. The worst employees stayed behind and proceeded to do the same buyout approach next time the company needed to save money. It was a natural selection feedback loop that took the company's engineering talent into the gutter.
I think the practice is old, and /might/ have once made more sense.
If you offer a buyout to a bunch of people in a factory with no real alternative, you're selecting for the people who want to do nothing - which is probably the people who are doing (close to) nothing.
If you offer a buyout to a bunch of people with real alternatives, you're going to mostly buyout the people with the best alternatives (the most marketable employee / the most productive).
This is amplified by the fact that factory workers really have a minimum amount they must be productive. Whereas software engineers can LITERALLY do nothing. Further, factory workers have a pretty low limit on how productive they can be. The limit is much higher for software engineers.
It's an old practice that might have made sense, but definitely does not make sense in software.
