Have you worked at any of these large companies? It’s really easy actually (practically, not emotionally). It’s usually very obvious and there’s consensus who the bottom 10% are. Politics would affect promotions much more than layoff.
You believe what you want to believe. That’s the lie of the century. Every single layoff is performance based to some degree. Sure you want to consolidate a couple orgs or shut down a project or an office and you lump that together with your performance based stuff.
(Also I was responding to a more generic comment saying doing layoff is bad and makes org more political.)
You’re being sarcastic but it is for sentimental reasons (for the immediate manager and team who doesn’t want to make the hard choices and do the work) as well as the empire building reasons (managers’ universal dick measuring contest is org size [1]).
[1]: the real debate is not “who’s my lowest performer” for each manager. It is about why I should cut rather than my sibling manager. If you force everyone to cut one person they all know who it will be.
It's funny because in this response you are arguing exactly the same thing as I was in my first comment: team sizes are always defined by political reasons (at manager's level, I didn't mention that above because I thought that was obvious, but here we are).
The duds who are the best at telling stories about how important their project is are the ones who can get the budget their team growing, and they are also the ones who are the most likely to defend their interests in the event of a layoff. Because, as you noted yourself, it is never about every individual manager selecting their lowest performers and laying them off, and much more about individual managers (at all levels) defending their own perimeter.
And in practice, being good at this type of games isn't a good proxy for knowing which managers are good at fostering an efficient team under them.
The point I am making is it does not matter if you are cutting 3%. Sure you might end up taking out a third of the bottom 0-10% instead of 0-3% but what difference does it make? It won't be a material political concern for your 50+ percentile employee base.
It does, however, make a difference on the promotion side.
> Sure you might end up taking out a third of the bottom 0-10% instead of 0-3% but what difference does it make?
That's not how it works! You'd have entire projects or department being sacked, with many otherwise very competent people being laid off, and projects deemed strategic being completely immune from layoff.
And even inside departments or projects, the people best seen by management will be safe, and the people more focused on actual work will be more at risk.
The harsh truth is that an organization simply has no way to even know who the “bottom 10% performance-wise” are. (And management assessment tend to correlate negatively with actual performance)
