Unless I'm missing something in the article, this is entirely speculative, based on a trivial multiplication of the percentile rankings of a new performance review system designed well before the current economic headwinds. Notice the liberal use of the word "could" when describing how these percentiles supposedly translate to layoffs.
FWIW, this is from Forbes's pay-to-play "contributor" network.
Let me guess, their performance metric is SLOC? :')