Research shows the long-term effects of disruption are a function of its duration. (If you’re looking for the paper I am referencing, it was an IMF paper on the effects of conflict on economic productivity.) Short and harsh is better than long and simmering.
I get that. If there's a layoff or a re-org going on, getting it all done at once is better. The idea of losing poor performers on an annual basis is the one I cannot get behind.
I am perfectly fine with the idea that someone who isn't doing there job loses it. Where I have a problem is that once a year managers are told to dump their lowest performing people. The reality is that people will game the system. They will hire with the intention of firing. They will fire people who are adversarial either personally or professionally. They will fire people for arbitrary reasons. They will fire people for personal reasons. While tech work is easy to come by right now, it does not mean that the experience will be easy to deal with. Each person who was fired will now have to explain themselves to their families and their prospective employers. I doubt many of them took the job in the first place knowing it was not a stable environment.
The alternative to arbitrarily requiring a proportion of staff are fired on a certain day and thus institutionalising the necessity of having disposable staff members to protect your core team is setting real performance standards, offering real criteria for improvement and firing people that can't or won't improve to meet standards regardless of what time of year it is.
Companies that impose forced stack rankings and firing quotas don't exactly have a great track record of avoiding large redundancies in recessions, and indeed due to company-wide underperformance...
