> Then, it's the "leaders" (the top brass - founders, etc) who decide that things have gone too far and we need to make brutal 10% cuts across the board.
I agree with the general sentiment of your points, but aren't those 10-20-30% layoffs an attempt to make the bottom line look better before the call with the investors? In my experience most layoffs have a goal to reduce spend by X rather than churn underperformers. And often times managers aren't even allowed to target based on merit, but on some weird metric which is a mixture of compensation and impact.
I agree with the general sentiment of your points, but aren't those 10-20-30% layoffs an attempt to make the bottom line look better before the call with the investors? In my experience most layoffs have a goal to reduce spend by X rather than churn underperformers. And often times managers aren't even allowed to target based on merit, but on some weird metric which is a mixture of compensation and impact.