My theory is that when an organization descends into a cycle of repetitive downsizings, it inevitably leads to people focusing more on protecting their jobs than on business value.
By the process of natural selection, the people who survive such rounds of firings are the ones with the political skills to survive them. Some of those guys will be star performers, but most will simply be politicians. Over time, this process will result in an increase in the ratio of politicians to star performers.
My company’s been through layoffs/reorgs every 3–6 months for three years. One thing is true: performance management happens faster. Many chronic low performers were laid off, and a few “too many cooks” problems were resolved. Those benefits are real and genuine.
But it’s a mistake to assume the remainder is automatically high‑performer‑only. Three patterns I’ve seen:
1) People with options leave first. If you can find a stable, supportive org at similar pay, you go. That’s often your top performers. We've lost some truly amazing people who left because they were simply not willing to tolerate working here anymore. Being absolutely ruthless in getting rid of low performers is honestly not worth it when you also lose the people who truly move the needle on creating new products, etc. If you make a mistake and get rid of some people who were talented high-performers, trust is instantly gone. The remaining high-performers now know that they may also be a target, and so they won't trust you and they'll leave whenever they can. And when you're axing 10k+ people, you're absolutely going to make mistakes.
2) The survivors change. Trust and empathy plummet. Incentives tilt toward optics and defensiveness, and managers start competing on visible ruthlessness. You can keep the lights on, but actually trying to innovate in this environment is too scary and risky.
3) In an atmosphere of fear, people who are willing to be genuinely dishonest and manipulative -- and who are good enough at it to get away with it -- have a serious competitive advantage. I've seen good, compassionate leaders go from a healthy willingness to make tough decisions on occasion to basically acting like complete psychopaths. Needless to say, that's extremely corrosive to meaningful output. While you could argue that skillful dishonesty is an individual advantage regardless of climate, an environment of repeat layoffs strongly incentivizes this behavior by reducing empathy, rewarding "do whatever it takes to win" behavior, etc.
Your comment made wonder if there is an social / economic phenomenon tied to your characterization. I'd be really curious if there is any academic work done on further elucidating it.
Edit: Did some research with ChatGPT and found the following papers if anyone else is interested in the above concepts.
At companies where decimation is a given... IME 3 or variations of 3 predominantly are already in play.
The most nefarious kind I saw was to use tenure capital towards influencing peers (above and below) into over-engineering complexity to improve longevity (or simply to flex on the basis of tenure) and this is a game-able closed loop. The longer one has been in a position is in a position to stay even longer via influence and no-one questions.
The up-levels explain this as "trust" which probably is slop/laziness or pure lack of time due to how busy the up-levels are managing up the chain (and working towards their own longevity)
The below-levels probably are afraid to question/oppose strongly due to obvious reasons. This becomes worse if the tenured person in question is already a "celebrated hero" or "10x-er".
Unless you are in the position of Zuckerberg or the Google founders, everyone’s main motivation is to keep their jobs.
If you are just an employee - it’s beyond naive to prioritize anything but your own job. Of course I am not advocating back stabbing and throwing others under the bus. Getting ahead in BigTech is always about playing politics and getting on the right projects to show “impact”.
It's a matter of it being an active vs passive effort to "keep your job." Once you have to actively worry about the status of your job something is wrong (be it with you or your employer).
By the process of natural selection, the people who survive such rounds of firings are the ones with the political skills to survive them. Some of those guys will be star performers, but most will simply be politicians. Over time, this process will result in an increase in the ratio of politicians to star performers.