if I was told by my boss to do something like deactivate X, change something to Y, or in this case, fire X% of people, do people really expect employees to not

if I was told by my boss to do something like deactivate X, change something to Y, or in this case, fire X% of people, do people really expect employees to not follow it? The implication is that their instructions were much more detailed than "fire X% of people" and included using LoC as the metric, which nobody questioned. (Any quantitative measurement of code quality will have too many outliers to be fair. LoC? Of course not. Number of closed PRs? You can't say much without knowing their complexity or severity. Etc. But they had to be quick, not fair.)