Is it "really weird," though? Layoffs, especially when you start talking about entire teams, divisions, products, etc. is about revenue, profitability, and righting the ship (or safeguarding the ship so you don't have to right it 6 months from now). Whether Jim got "exceeds expectations" or "greatly exceeds expectations" is irrelevant when an EVP needs to trim $12M off their budget and Jim's department lost $9M last year.
A common sentiment you see on the internet (especially from younger people who haven't experience a tough labor market) is that only the low performers get laid off. So I can see how they think it's really weird if managers aren't involved.
Low performers always 100% of the time get dropped during layoffs. It's the one window that companies can mostly let go of employees without being sued. (Though, if they lay off too many people in a protected class, still can get sued). What's interesting about a lot of the division or sector-downturn layoffs, that you end up seeing solid performers, and, when you are dropping a good portion of your division - very good performers let go. Most companies try to make a play for keeping their 10x developers - but, I've been in layoffs (Browser Division, Netscape, 1997sh) - where just absolutely everyone was dropped, regardless of performance.
> Low performers always 100% of the time get dropped during layoffs.
This is totally not true. Usually they make jobs redundant not people. If there's a pool of people doing the same job and that headcount is reduced then it will often be the lowest performers that go however some places have done LIFO or cut the most expensive.
However if you're doing layoffs and you reduce your frontend team the it's likely low performers from the backend team get to stick around.
I've been through 18 layoffs since 1996, about 12 of them while in management. I can only speak to the Bay Area - practices may be different outside. You are correct, that lots of times positions/jobs are made "redundant" as part of the layoffs - but speaking as someone who both observed, and participated in the process - those "redundant" positions were quickly backfilled after the layoffs if there was any need.
The one exception might have been when the entire browser division was dropped back in Netscape - everyone was chopped there - but I can't say with certainty whether low-performing Server Division people were impacted (though IT and HR positions were chopped). So - fair, when a division or operating group is cut wholesale, low-performers in other divisions might not be dropped - but knowing the mindset of management - they really like to take advantage of a layoff as a "get out of jail free" card to let someone go. Much less stress, and way, way less paperwork.
When I saw layoffs at a small company (i.e., you could know all the engineers in the company) you could have probably guessed who they would have been by how well they seemed to perform. When I saw it in a big company, not much rhyme or reason tbh.
Which "makes sense" since companies usually try to keep the team deciding who to lay people off very small for fear of leaks. So the n people at a small company making the decisions might know everyone but the same n people at a large company might barely even know the names of all the middle-managers much less all the individual contributors and how well they are each doing within their role.
Everyone is in a protected class because everyone has a nationality, immigration status, ethnicity, sex, sexuality, etc.
The EEOC investigates workplace discrimination, so if you suspect it, it would help to file a complaint with them. They can gather evidence to determine if discrimination took/takes placr and hold the employer accountable.
One of HRs jobs is to track % of people who are > 40. If you are a company of 1000 employees, and you are 25% of each age group 20+,30+,40+,50+ and you do a 100 person layoff, and 100% of them are 40+ - you will be sued and they will almost certainly win.
I was part of lay offs some years ago. Managers didn’t know until the day of, and it wasn’t based on performance. All the performance reviews were already done months before. Some people were even due for promotions.
If layoffs are occurring, companies or managers are going to want to cut poor performers or trouble employees at that time.
So if younger employees are saying it's cutting low performers, and the rest are left as the younger and lower paid workers to pick up the slack, where senior levels are cut indiscriminately or based on salary, because they are higher paid and the goal is to cut expensive workers.
Assuming perfect information, Jim's skill being transferable, and Jim's performance eval being objective, you'd expect that the company would profit from transferring Jim and other top performers to their profitable products, and cutting the worst employees from those projects (after all, even a department making profit is likely to have some employees on the low end of the performance bell curve).
Of course that isn't as easy because of morale, team cohesion, performance evals rarely being comparable across teams, and people being not as fungible as the above suggests. Not to mention all the work this takes, in a time when you probably have other worries. So maybe it's not "really weird", just "not immediately obvious"
I feel like pc86 was just being straightforward about how those decisions are made. They can speak for themselves though.
When I was part of a mass lay-off, it was big enough to trigger CA state law where they had to detail everything. You could clearly see that it was strictly based on who was paid the most (below the managerial level).
>The 'righting' came because of shitty financial decisions made from top-down. The top should be fired first and foremost. The company wouldn't be in the position its in if management were doing their fucking jobs.
Should but rarely, if ever, happens. Some even get a larger bonus when meeting next quarter targets or some other short-term indicator.
> it was strictly based on who was paid the most (below the managerial level)
The "(below the managerial level)" part is the problem and the reason it is outrageous to people invested in a company but not in a position of power (such as the actual developers/engineers, even in a tech-centric company, at least once it has grown to a given size).
A lot of times what you'll see done is structured more as a reorg than just a straight layoff, where if they need to trim $xM from the budget, they'll start shrinking and eliminating teams at the IC level until they reach .7-.8 of that figure, then see how many "extra" managers they have and start trimming there, typically just based on seniority rather than pay. Rinse and repeat until you're at .9-1.1x depending on how many people you think will resign after the layoffs.
