My manager was terminated before he could complete reviews for his staff (he was forbidden from telling any of us about it, because they wanted us to be surprised we were being fired, so my immediate manager just up and vanished one morning). His manager, and that person's manager both turned over from the company weeks ago after they were given a courtesy notice of this event coming. Rackspace then reacted to the turnover and forced the highest manager mentioned so far to stay and personally fire everyone.
I understand that you think your theory regarding this layoff is correct. It is not. Performance reviews had absolutely nothing to do with this event. At all. This event involved cost center.
Proof I'm legit: The meeting invite to fire everyone was called "Business Update," and scheduled by Liana Greenberg on behalf of Scott Crenshaw. They fired 30 at a time, then quickly cleared the room for the next batch.
I was guessing review/stack/rank at the beginning of the year because I've spent time working at recently PE bought company, and quit once I saw the pattern.
When do managers write reviews? They don't have to be delivered to the employees before rank/stack/layoff...