There's also always the possibility that someone is struggling in a role or company or project, bored and unmotivated or burned out, and they will be amazing for you in the role you need.

And it's also possible they were actually high performing in their last role but they managed to bruise someone's ego and wound up first on the layoff list as a result.

There is just way more to firings and layoffs than performance.

People also are only fungible to a point (depending on role). If a company makes organizational or directional changes and the role someone was hired into doesn't really exist any longer, there's no guarantee that they can do a very different role equally well and/or that the company will necessarily be interested in making a person who would never have been hired into that role from the outside work out somehow just because they're with the company already.

Mind you. Companies can do more with internal development/retraining and institutional knowledge is a thing especially with large organizations. But, at some point, no one's going to be happy.

> Companies can do more with internal development/retraining and institutional knowledge is a thing especially with large organizations

I remember, many years ago, being tasked with teaching PHP to the mainframe COBOL team - we’d retired the mainframe, and all our COBOL apps with it, but we’d kept the team, and management had struggled with finding them something else to do. It was a painful experience, they were getting it, but very slowly. Didn’t help that I wasn’t the best teacher, I had to slow myself down a lot and found that a struggle - but I was young and inclined to say “Yes” to everything.

Eventually, they were all laid-off - and pretty much straight-away found new COBOL jobs (with a higher salary too). I think, in the end, they were happier that way.