And... how is that relevant?

Your grandparent comment insinuates that executive measures to increase productivity are broad and actually hurt productivity.

I agree for what its worth.

But what these executives and their supporters think is that productive employees will stay the same productive employees with the changes, and that only the unproductive employees will face consequences.

Of course this is ass backwards and we all know it, the innocent are always somehow the biggest victims in war ("blood in the streets" as this executive cheerily calls it).

Ah, gotcha. Yeah, from various discussions with the VP of my department, it's become clear to me that execs and other higher-ups have very... fantastical ideas, to put it lightly, about what actually happens in their employees' daily lives, and how their policies will affect those workers.

I've had my own fantasies recently about telling the execs to spend two weeks sitting in the office between us devs and taking notes about what actually happens, to use as reference material when discussing policy changes. But then I realize that the very idea of requiring evidence to support one's decisions is what separates the lowly devs like me from the big-shot execs with name plaques on their office desk and a few extra zeroes on their paycheck deposits. Which is... quite depressing when you consider we're a STEM field, so evidence and logic should matter throughout our hierarchy, but then again, capitalism and corporatocracy have perverse incentives, I guess.

Getting rid of those types will increase productivity. You'll get the same work done with less people. Well, probably more, because you won't have guys pretending to do their work and then not actually producing anything.

You'll also get more burnout on the remaining people, which will reduce productivity. It's a balancing act that really shouldn't be dismissed as "just fire anyone who's not productive enough; I'm sure that won't be a problem for the rest of the team".

I'm talking about firing the people who are basically doing nothing. They're likely a drain on everyone else already. You get rid of the dead weight, I personally feel morale will improve. Do you like knowing people are making the same salary as you, basically doing nothing? I know of cases where people were doing like 2 hours of work... a week.

On the one hand, the visceral reaction is "no, that sucks". On the other hand, that's 2 hours less work I need to worry about every week, which is better than nothing. So it entirely depends on how much work there is, and how much they're actually doing, since it's almost never actually zero. Someone doing 2 hours of work a week is not a drain, they are literally making other people have less work. A drain would create more work (which is certainly possible, but that's a different scenario).

My morale is determined by how much work I have to do, how supported I am by my bosses, and how much input I have on the work I'm doing. That's... really it. Unless someone else is causing me to have more work by being here, or making my job harder, or blocking my input, then I don't really care whether they're doing "as much work as me" or how much they're getting paid. And in that regard, firing them -- which would leave me with more work, as I'd have to pick up the work they were doing -- would lower my morale, not improve it.