A team of excellent people will still have someone at the bottom of productivity on that team; that doesn't make them a low performer. I think you're confusing

A team of excellent people will still have someone at the bottom of productivity on that team; that doesn't make them a low performer. I think you're confusing poor performance with ranking. If you have 10 awesome developers, are you going to fire the 10th best just because he's the 10th? That's what's being discussed, firing the bottom guy without regard to whether he's actually good or bad, merely because he's the bottom guy.