When firing 14% staff like more than 1000 and decisions are made by handful of people it’s not about who performed better or worse it’s about firing whom will have more impact on reducing spendings and less disruption in software delivery.
I know few highly paid engineers survived twitter lay offs. They were very good in their domain, and have been working for more than 10 years at twitter.
Cost of keeping talented high performing, highly paid engineers is lesser than letting go low performing engineers.
Usually, these 14% lay off happens to get rid off weaker folks. It is data driven.