I'd hope so, but it's a lot harder to identify the high performers, figure out where to transfer them to, cut low performers from the teams they're moving to, etc. Unfortunately much easier to just cut teams as the company cuts scope.
It’s very easy to have people who are widely regarded as high performers. But transfers are often limited when layoffs are happening and, in practice, execs often don’t want to transfer headcount to other teams even if it’s probably the right thing to do from an overall company perspective.
Identifying high performers can be subjective, just look at Google's promotion practices. Productive engineers also tend to get paid more, making them an attractive target when reducing payroll spend.
Yep. You have someone who the mythical company “they” think is awesome but their team was disbanded, there’s no ideal and obvious role for them, transfers are mostly on hold anyway, etc. At some point a bunch of people are sorry they couldn’t find a way to keep the person but they can’t really do anything. And parking them somewhere they aren’t really a good fit isn’t ideal anyway.
