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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

I believe it. Obviously there are exceptions, when a whole function is dropped for example. And the biggest caveat is that "low performer" in the eyes of a company is does not equate to any kind of objective judgement about a person's intelligence or competency, it's heavily situation dependent.

That aside, it's common sense that the people laid off are skewed towards those that the company doesn't want, so people at the bottom of what the company defines as performance. Companies don't just arbitrarily dump those who are making great contribution to what the company considers important, whatever they may tell you

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You are assuming a lot of competence on the behalf of management which seems naive to me.

No, I'm trying to explicitly say that performance is subjective, and the judge of it is your bosses, the management.

I understand that point but I think you’re probably off base in your assumption (that businesses will not lay off the people that they have subjectively evaluated as “best”). In my experience these things are handled poorly from start to finish because management in big companies is extremely dysfunctional.

Layoffs are to save money. Many companies will rather layoff 1 person making above market rate than 2 making below market rate. Performance is obviously a factor, but not the only one.

If you have aggressively negotiated your cash compensation very high based on high performance during an economic boom you are at a high risk of getting laid off when the economy turns around. Imagine a graph with performance and compensation as axises, anyone below some slope is a layoff candidate.

Well yes, performance is always relative to comp. The expectations for someone making 400k per year are higher than for someone making 100k. If you're not living up to the expected value for someone making your comp, you're underperforming.

> Well yes, performance is always relative to comp

This is transparently false. Expectations are relative to comp.

Fair enough. Maybe that's the reason "good employees" get laid off. They are good from a coworkers perspective, but just not good enough for their pay. (assuming all measurements were meaningful and objective)

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