This is a SQL query.. in terms of a large organization, you should expect a large-scale performance review based firing to follow the demographics of the company. If your query has enriched for older people you have a problem. Also when you do fire people who have a longer tenure it begs the question as to why you didn't fire them earlier. I would find it very suspicious if you said they performed poorly this year vs last year and that is why they were fired as most big companies have processes to improve performance over a time period. The statistics will tell the story. IBM needs to made an example of.