Often they target the lowest performers for such layoff. Of course they rarely succeed in doing that, but the idea is that these people should have been let go anyway but weren’t for various reasons.
> Often they target the lowest performers for such layoff.
In my experience, this is often an after-the-fact rationalization by people who "survive" layoffs to explain them, and a convenient justification by leadership for layoffs. If you've ever been in the room when layoffs are planned or discussed, the actual process is way more focused on blunt cost, personality of the people involved or on the chopping block, and is often practically a tossup considering "performance" is not really a clear or meaningful metric (actually, more often it's arbitrary for most companies --- they will find the metric they need to justify laying off someone). This phenomenon is greater the bigger the company and the more abstracted managers and leadership are from their lower level employees.
In many cases it can actually be inversely proportional to performance, since the one factor they can count in black and white is how much the person costs. Laying off someone making a TC of $500K probably feels like you're saving the company a lot of money, but its also possible the reason they were making that much is because they were more than twice as productive/valuable as the person making $250K. But salary and benefits are easy to quantify, and performance is not.
I've heard secondhand that a few layoffs of star players was as messed up as "well Suzy is pregnant, but we need to axe someone else to justifty it as being coincidental". It shouldn't be surprising at this point, but companies can and do go that far sometimes just to cover their tracks. slicing their nose off to spite the pimple.
Many times the marching orders were to fire the high earners, assuming that the remaining, less well compensated workers, could together do the same work for less.
