It seems unlikely to me that they'll turn up the pressure on the high performers. More likely they'll just raise the bar for what is considered adequate. The real pain will be having less people to do the work, but that happens with layoffs as well.

Ok so high performers are fine, low performers are out. What about everyone else?

It’s not “making people suffer”. It is having high expectations for performance that A-players and teams can easily hit. If companies are going to survive during a crisis time when the whole world is facing headwinds, there is no margin for error, at FB or anywhere.

Layoffs are always awful, they take jobs away from people without them having a say. They should always be a last resort.

End result is the same people without jobs. Raising expectations and making people quit has the side effect of those “low performers” leaving, some people easily hitting the expectations, and most people busting their ass to keep up. Sounds bad to me.

I don’t really see this as an extinction level downturn for fb. Time will tell, but I’d be shocked if this seriously threatened the company in any way except its share price.