There may be some disparity in the way this happens due to the size of the company. Most of my jobs have been with very large corporations, and the way it usually works is they don't put you on new high visibility projects. When the next round of layoffs come you're the most expendable.
That is not how layoffs worked in companies I have worked at. The goal is to reduce 'head count' and in the real world cost.
They rank you by pay and tenure. Then decided if they can do without you. It almost rarely has anything to do with how good you are. But more 'my project would not finish in x time if y was gone'. Then they decide to keep the whole project or not and if they get rid of the project that means maybe 15 other people can go too.
After a particular level in many large companies you become a cost number instead of a person.
What you are working on may seem important. At least it is to you. But in the grand scheme of things most of what we work on is ethereal. I have been in this industry coming up on 30 years now. Very little of what I have ever worked on is even in production anymore. Thousands and thousands of lines of code, just gone, of no use anymore. I just hope whatever I did work on can help me with the next few thousand.
In most large companies hiring and firing people are totally different, and rarely ever talk to each other. This is why in most companies if the top management wants to make a big layoff, they first let go the 'recruiting staff', and then work from there.
In smaller layoffs, I'd imagine they'd continue to fill in open positions, while eliminating positions they think they don't need.
There's also another thing where they want to fill in people where they think need for their newer/hot/important project which they think will give them better profits. And cut people/shut down projects which they think are not important/profitable.
Big companies have to compete with other big companies. What if you lay off your employees in order to make a product with a similar scope as before, but your competitor hires more people and expands the scope of their project significantly?
Another risk that I have seen play out more than once at large corporations is that people who are "indispensable" and tied heavily to a particular project will often get laid off rather than moved to new roles when that project is cancelled.
Large scale lay offs are generally done blind to avoid accusations of bias: they don’t lay off low performers, they use some other fixed criteria (like laying off teams, people under X tenure, etc…).
Performance based layoffs have to be well documented and take lots of time, so they just happen continuously but in small numbers. At least, that is how it seems to me.
Layoffs happen at different scales within a company. Individual departments can have layoffs that aren't newsworthy. If someone's budget gets cut, they might have to layoff a number of people.
The reason the big layoffs are newsworthy is that they impact most or all of the company at once. The big layoffs are usually associated with company-wide hiring slowdowns. The individual org/department layoffs are often not really noteworthy in the context of the entire company.
The issue with layoffs is that it's not just the low performers being fired. Typically managers are given a preference or salary amount that has to be cut. Inevitably the low performers are the first to be out on the list, but often times they'll also cut some of the high projects because they're making too much money. This even assumes that it's the managers making the decisions. If not, what happens is that layoffs are random message by someone outside the department and you can get stuck with low performers
You are a company. The system we have demands growth. Even very stable and reliable profits are seen as failure. There must be growth.
The people who run a company can not press a magic button to increase revenues. They can't just pull a successful new project out of nowhere. Anything like that is going to be a risk, and will probably fail. It will also take time.
The one thing they can always do is cut costs. Projects can be cancelled. Divisions can be sold off. The biggest cost at most companies is labor, and labor can be let go.
When someone controls a company, they own a lot of shares in that company. Their bosses are all shareholders who only care that the stock price goes up. Nothing the company is doing is generating huge new revenue streams. Time for layoffs.
And when some people do layoffs, everyone does them. They're all subject to the same market pressures in the same industry. One company doing them gives all the other companies in the sector permission to do likewise. If a company doesn't follow suit the market might even start to question why.
You may have seen some news that Microsoft passed Apple briefly in terms of most valuable company on Earth. You may have also noticed that Apple is much more restrained in its layoffs than the others. Not doing as many layoffs, not doing as well in the market. These things are not unrelated.
Over the past 24 years, I've been through six major layoffs and it is always the middle managers that go first. Recently my company went through a massive layoff. I don't know a single developer that was let go, but plenty of middle and upper managers were.
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