Common. A trillion years ago when I was at Travelocity and layoffs came down senior leadership wanted to be fair. Critical positions to the business were safe.

Common. A trillion years ago when I was at Travelocity and layoffs came down senior leadership wanted to be fair. Critical positions to the business were safe. For everyone else a quota system was used to normalize headcount reduction by team. Level of leadership and performance were secondary to the quota. I had a nearly career ending shitty annual review just before the economy tanked. My job was super safe. I was a front end developer for a major web business before jQuery became popular. They could not find competent front end developers. It’s like they didn’t exist anywhere. For the most part this remains true today but everyone pretends otherwise after hiding behind these colossal frameworks and tons of abstraction layers. Now there is no reason to really know how to do that work because imposter syndrome is baked into the baseline.