To be fair, a handful of large companies have explicitly said[1][2] that their layoffs were largely about individual performance. All my experience as a manager in a large tech company says that that's almost certainly not the whole story, and unfair to many of the folks getting let go, but official word from the companies say otherwise.

1. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/14/meta-targeting-lowest-perfor...

2. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/08/microsoft-confirms-performan...

Productivity and performance are not the same thing. You can be a top performer on a project that flops and you're a net negative. Ideally you'd get transferred to a more productive role but there are a lot of variables involved.

Are you sure?

So getting rid of 20% of the workforce and selecting “the bottom 20%” is not a layoff?

You can loosely rank folks as best as you can but its still inherently a systemic action and not based on individuals. Other factors beyond individual performance caused the layoff.

You can’t always select the bottom 20%. Sometimes, whole teams or departments are eliminated. Employees are simply a number with cost and only thing matters is cost. They almost never look at individual performance or productivity.

If your manager or director is not getting laid off with you and you have a good relationship with them, then they might fight to keep you.