It’s very easy to have people who are widely regarded as high performers. But transfers are often limited when layoffs are happening and, in practice, execs often don’t want to transfer headcount to other teams even if it’s probably the right thing to do from an overall company perspective.

Identifying high performers can be subjective, just look at Google's promotion practices. Productive engineers also tend to get paid more, making them an attractive target when reducing payroll spend.

Yep. You have someone who the mythical company “they” think is awesome but their team was disbanded, there’s no ideal and obvious role for them, transfers are mostly on hold anyway, etc. At some point a bunch of people are sorry they couldn’t find a way to keep the person but they can’t really do anything. And parking them somewhere they aren’t really a good fit isn’t ideal anyway.

When the infighting gets serious enough to be obvious to an outside observer is my threshold.

If it's just some folks getting miffed because someone from another department stepped on their toes or made some unkind comments about their team, then that shouldn't be too serious.

I'm assuming it's mostly the latter at Stripe...