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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

They're also a legal CYA for layoffs. If a company does a mass layoff purportedly for financial reasons, they can take reviews into account and fire all those with low reviews, without that being considered legally quite the same as a firing of an individual.

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I don't think that's correct, or at least not everywhere. From what I get, when you're laying off people for economic reasons, you need to make vertical cuts of services or roles that underperform economically, but you can't use individual performance as the basis.

I’ve seen another loophole here. The pre-layoff restructuring that moves low performers into a restructured business vertical that is intentionally designed to look like it’s all economics for this purpose but really functions as a purge.

Legal details and jurisdictions may vary, but as far as I know, you can absolutely cut part of a group (or part of the entire company), not just entire groups/divisions/etc. And you can apply uniform company-wide criteria to select the subset of the group to lay off.

I agree. My understanding of layoffs is you're closing out the role, and thus, the person holding the role loses it. This is separate from the actual performance of said person. Conversely, for a poor performer, you're cutting off the person but intend to refill the role with a better one.

Going from 10 people on a team to 8 and not planning to re-hire back up to 10 is also closing out roles.

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