OTOH, just because it happens doesn't necessarily mean someone meant it to.
That is, for most companies it's hard to imagine creating a project just to fire someone. But it's very, very easy to picture a natural progression like: "new project starts and needs internal transfers -> several managers see an opportunity to get rid of bad/disruptive team members -> project fails because half its team was bad/disruptive".
Never attribute to, etc.
I beg your pardon, but I think that what you've expressed is a very naive viewpoint. Try a thought experiment. Imagine that you must reduce payroll. How do you do it without a layoff? Or, let me describe just one progression of events that I've seen play out a few times. BigCo acquires LittleCo after LittleCo starts killing BigCo with the new fancy LittleCo process/machine. The buyout terms required all LittleCo employees to be hired by BigCo. BigCo doesn't really care about these new folks, but BigCo promised, so BigCo tries to work them into the fold, and creates group "B" for them. BigCo also has its own internal group "A" of people who were doing the same thing as the folks from LittleCo, but who weren't killing it. BigCo starts shuffling people from "A" to "B" and "B" to "A" or vice-versa, whichever is more convenient; until they have the smart people and cool kids in one group, and the rest of the people in the other. Now, what do you propose will happen to now non-performing group filled with people most of whom may not be fired or laid-off? At BigCo, what happens is that the group of step-children gets a new chief and new "Project Managers". These new leaders are sticklers for the rules though, and have their own ideas about every detail of working at BigCo from breaks & start & stop time, to parking spaces, to TPS reports, and other policies and procedures; and through the power of micro-management they are going to get the group into ship-shape, and do great things at BigCo!!! The new Vogon leadership never seem to get much work for the group though, and for those reasons, morale takes a dive. Then, lo and behold within a short time most of the step-children start getting the hint and either flee to a competitor, form another LittleCo, find a new line of work, or some combination of those things. How many times would you need to see a similar gambit play out for you to question whether maybe it happens that way by design?
I will agree a lot of projects are created with the thought "sure, why not gamble on this.. if it doesn't work, we can just dump our people."
I guess it's a pretty fine line.
Side question: how did you get a blank username?
It's not a complaint as much as it is an observation, but I wouldn't categorize BigCo's behavior as honest, it is deceptive.
I'll assume you're not being obtuse, but let's be real for a moment. BigCo management harbors no specific animosity for the step-children, a few of whom are actually former BigCo employees. BigCo is a big company, and we're talking about a small part of it. BigCo is actually indifferent to the step-children; but BigCo has a stuffy corporate culture in which certain kinds of people thrive and some otherwise excellent people do not. BigCo knows that it can't really allow the step-children to mingle with the rank and file or else the step-childred might infect them with freedom of thought or whatever it was that enabled LittleCo to beat BigCo at "X", or else there will be a TPS report revolt, or something. BigCo also has practical reasons such as not needing so many people doing job-X.
>ergo the project wasn't made just to fire people
"Firing" people is right out, that's a dirty mean-sounding word, and BigCo already agreed not to do that, so they have to offer laterals or something. The project definitely had a purpose, and the purpose wasn't to have two internal groups competing against each other at job-X.
>even though a predictable chain of events might lead to the same result as if it had been
Okay, so if you grok that a chain of events can be set into motion that will achieve the goal of reducing staff with the least amount of pain for management, why don't you grok that management might choose to do so for the purpose of reducing staff? A rose by any other name, so to speak. Management must reduce staff, management never really wanted most of that additional staff to begin with, but took it on because they had to. Management has limited means with which to accomplish the staff reductions, one of which consists of a few bean-counting "PM's" and a micro-managing idiot savant.
>I think we might be saying more or less the same thing.
We seem to have vastly different ideas about why the things happen.
Side Answer: The usual way.
It seems to me that you two agree on the observable parts of the theory and disagree on the motivation, which relies on their state of mind and is therefore not observable as such.
So it seems more like you agree than disagree to me, at least with respect to the things which can be observed.
However, if you go back to a question I posed further up: "Imagine that you must reduce payroll. How do you do it without a layoff? What other option is there to purge a portion of your staff without causing lots of other problems?
If you accept the notion that there are some companies which will periodically purge some staff, and then observe that some of those companies rarely or never have layoffs, then don't you have to accept that there are some similar shenanigans playing out at some of these companies from time to time?
But I'm going to also call it naive to say it's hard to imagine. I have a good friend in HR, and she has all sorts of friends working in HR and legal departments. Let's just say some of their conversations are very eye opening.
It's not hard to imagine at all, in general legal departments are conservative and executives want exactly what they want, no excuses. It can lead to all sorts of crazy machinations to get things done while covering the appropriate asses.
1. Noisy executive wants to do something
2. Everyone else agrees, sure go ahead, but you have to staff it with the freaks
3. Noisy executive either shuts up or rolls the dice because her idea is so good
4. Project usually dies a slow death or by some crazy chance, project heats up and freaks are all seen as heros which get supplemented by steady pragmatists. Often freaks get sidelined (rewarded?) into managerial roles or wander off to do some other risky thing.
Generally steady pragmatists avoid these projects like the plague. They are just not risk oriented.
This is sort of how startups work, btw.
And while it can be hard sometimes to think of your company as a machine which is optimizing its economic output, sometimes at your personal expense, you always have a choice of whether or not you want to participate. And sometimes when things get close to going all pear shaped they respond in economically attractive ways (like giving everyone a 10% pay raise).
[1] Cost is not simply dollars here, its impact on the organization.
1. Create an alternate project
2. Move trouble makers to the alternate project
3. Cancel the project
I've seen this happen on more than one occasion.