It is more complicated than that * losing the low performer in this context means you lose a head count. If you keep the low performer during hard times, you c

It is more complicated than that * losing the low performer in this context means you lose a head count. If you keep the low performer during hard times, you can hope to get them backfilled when the economic environment gets better * there are often more work to do than you have resources for: if as an EM, you have to deal with PM who refuse to adapt to capacity, you can simply assign the low perfomers to the projects you don't care about. * etc. once you reach a certain size, those issues happen in pretty much any organization in my experience.