Hasn't it been demonstrated that GE under Jack Welch was basically a massive fraud?
GE’s breathtaking growth under Welch was fueled in large part by its transformation into a financial services superpower. By 2000, nearly half of the company’s revenue—$96 billion—came from GE Capital
GE’s exposure to finance proved to be an enormous vulnerability after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and particularly during the financial crisis of 2008. While Welch’s successor, Jeff Immelt, tried to diminish GE’s reliance on finance, his efforts came too late.
I've read "At Any Cost: Jack Welch, General Electric, and the Pursuit of Profit" and I consider him a con man. Stack ranking was just a nice veener to justify layoffs whose primary motivation were to inflate the valuation of GE and increase its perceived profitability.
To be fair, Welch gave what the investors wanted, but he corrupted everything in pursuit of that. If the primary proof of stack ranking's "wisdom" was that GE's stock went up then that is a sad indictment of the state of business culture in the West.
Basically, Jack Welch was in the right place at the right time, probably (almost definitely) played semi-legal accounting games to beat analyst estimates (a practice which later led to accounting fraud charges [2]), and pretty much mortgaged the company's future in exchange for short-term boosts by selling off many of its business units and focusing on GE Capital, which basically got annihilated a few years after Jack left. So he was also a master of leaving other people holding the bag. Also, the man was apparently (according to many people who worked with him) a massive asshole with a huge ego problem and would epitomize every negative stereotype of white male executives if he were still alive today [3].
[1] https://www.afr.com/work-and-careers/leaders/jack-welch-infl...
[2] https://www.cfo.com/accounting-tax/2009/08/ge-settles-accoun...
[3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-jack-welch-wont-be-missed/
In one, the company cuts an entire business unit, or a company shuts down, or something else cataclysmic happens. This is where you have dozens/hundreds of people let go. Outside of small startups, this seems pretty rare. I think selling/divesting a failing business unit is more common than outright shutdown in tech.
In the second, the employee does something really egregious and gets straight-up terminated for cause (fired). Absenteeism, theft of company property, sexual harassment, something so bad it's borderline illegal and potentially a legal risk for the employer if they don't do something about it.
The third, which is what we're seeing here, is a general reduction in bloat done under the guise of "the economy". In my experience, great people don't tend to get let go in situations like this--it's political cover to remove the bottom 10%. Companies, at least in tech, don't make a routine practice of doing this without "a reason".
Being in the bottom 10% can happen for a lot of reasons. Maybe you just lost interest in the work. Perhaps you don't get along with your manager, or something's going on in your personal life, or the role was never a good fit in the first place. I used to think some people were just "bad", and some indeed are, but it also seems like peoples' performance really does change over their careers. Provided there's good unemployment insurance, probably best for both parties to part ways. Not only does it give the employee a kick in the pants, but it also improves the morale of the rest of the team, because it doesn't feel like someone isn't "pulling their weight".
I'm actually surprised how slowly most tech companies shed staff. In general, it seems the industry is pretty hit-driven, and if you're attached to a good product that's still making money, there's rarely much attrition, even when perhaps there should be. Conversely, a lot of great people get let go when a product isn't working (misses the market or no sales). It all seems kind of arbitrary and random. It's a lot different than, say, a restaurant with really tight margins where you're a day away from getting fired if you aren't perceived to be pulling your weight.
Thought 2: if you’re getting let go for performance reasons in a bad time for the company, often they really don’t have performance gripes, but they don’t want to put up with unemployment or file a lay-off, so they let go people that can possibly be fired for performance.
Meanwhile the careerists at Microsoft seem pretty happy, fwiw. My closest friend there seems content to work there for the rest of his life and he seems to be producing good quality work, even if they are pushing him into management.
Microsoft has historically been pretty ruthless about annual culls. It used to be in the GE mode of cutting the bottom 5-10% each year. More recently it’s more quiet.
I don’t begrudge companies this. They need to move resources where they’re most needed.