Productivity and performance are not the same thing. You can be a top performer on a project that flops and you're a net negative. Ideally you'd get transferred to a more productive role but there are a lot of variables involved.

To be fair, a handful of large companies have explicitly said[1][2] that their layoffs were largely about individual performance. All my experience as a manager in a large tech company says that that's almost certainly not the whole story, and unfair to many of the folks getting let go, but official word from the companies say otherwise.

1. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/14/meta-targeting-lowest-perfor...

2. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/08/microsoft-confirms-performan...

Are you sure?

So getting rid of 20% of the workforce and selecting “the bottom 20%” is not a layoff?