That’s not necessarily the case, especially at smaller companies. A friend of mine leads a department of ~20 people at a midsize company (~1000 employees). The

That’s not necessarily the case, especially at smaller companies. A friend of mine leads a department of ~20 people at a midsize company (~1000 employees). They were told late one afternoon that the company was announcing a 10% layoff the following day, that they needed to reduce their departmental payroll accordingly, and to submit a list of employees to lay off by next morning, using performance as the primary criterion for whom to cut. This was feasible and fair, since a manager of 20 people can know exactly how well each of them is performing. (In fact, the employees my friend ended up dismissing were ones they’d wanted to get rid of for a while, but didn’t quite meet the stringent criteria for PIPing, so it was actually a relief to be able to let them go.) At bigger companies, layoffs cannot get decided with such granularity (decisions come from several levels above managers familiar with each and every employee being laid off), so individual performance is a much smaller factor.