Not necessarily. When it comes to someone's livelihood, 'performance' is subjective. Have you ever been involved in employee performance evaluation for stuff li

Not necessarily. When it comes to someone's livelihood, 'performance' is subjective. Have you ever been involved in employee performance evaluation for stuff like stack ranking? It's very easy to spin a failure as a success or the other way around. Say you're a decent performer and a reorg will make you end up under someone who does not have the same belief, even if by objective metrics they may be wrong. You become a low performer without any chances in your objective performance. FAANG style random layoffs if done like ripping off the band-aid are not ideal but, in my view, ritualistic performance-based firings are way more draining for the morale of any organization. Not saying that companies should keep low performers onboard, I'm just saying that if you involve the incentive of reducing the number of employees, management will find low performers everywhere and will drive the other employees either into burnout or to their competitors..