I mean, it seems like the stock price would go
up too if they laid off 20
We laid off 20% on Jan 31st, and our stock price...
...or, uh, I should say their stock price, because I was one of the 20%...
...did go up.
If you lay off too many, it starts to look like panic and/or it starts to look like you were running your business in an clueless way, with tons of dead weight and/or bad hires.
10-20% seems "safe" to me. It doesn't spook investors too much. Generally, if you look at almost any team, at least 1 in 5 are not performing amazingly. IMO this happens even in well run companies and is often purely a fit issue and is not necessarily an indictment of either employer or employee. It also means you're not necessarily destroying any particular team
(Example: you have a talented front end engineer, but they've been pressed into more of a "full stack" role and they're forced to do a bunch of backend work that is far from their strengths. No, I'm not describing myself. Not a front end guy.)
This wave of 10-20% cuts feels like an opportunistic version of the notorious "stack ranking" that Microsoft used to do.
I'm not defending any of this. I'm not really criticizing it either. It's just my strong impression of what it is. I'm f'ing numb to this industry at this point, honestly.