Well, the colloquial understanding of a “layoff” is that it is not based on underperformers, but based on changing business conditions.

For example, closing a plant, or getting out of a line of business. If Uber decides not to have anything more to do with self-driving vehicles, they might lay off everyone in its division.

That would have nothing to do with poor performance on the part of individuals.

On the other hand, there is “These people are underperformers,” which is part of Uber’s allegation as they throw their former employees under the bus rather than take responsibility for their management choices.

I contend that if people are underperformers, a constant trickle of letting such people go is not bad for morale. It’s perfectly normal.

“Did you hear they let Dave go?” “Yeah. What took them so long?” That’s the usual talk.

Whereas, “Did you hear that they shut down ML?” “Yeah, and it was half the database tuning group last month, who’ll be next?” “I dunno, but I’m not hanging around to find out...” is the thing you are describing.

Long story short, I agree that a trickle of layoffs is not good, but I suggest that this is true when the people being let go are not thought of as holding the company back.

I disagree that it doesn’t matter who it is. If they are underperforming in the sense of being bottom 10% but still carrying their costs, I agree with you about trickle, but then we can’t claim that letting them go makes the company stronger.

But if they are underperforming to the extent that letting them go makes the engineering group more effective, then management should have identified them earlier, done everything in its power to make them perform, and let them go if they didn’t improve.

Ignoring net negative employees, or being blind to whether they are net negative, or keeping them around even though they are known to be net negative is bad for the company’s bottom line and bad for its morale.

Hello Reginald, I am a fan and a fellow Torontonian!

I agree with your points, but optics might depend on a company. In a startup or smaller company being aware that underperforming employees are let go might actually improve morale. For bigger companies it is a typical situation that you notice or get to know that people from other teams are gone, but you may not be aware of their performance.

True, but then again you probably don't notice so much. Every month there is a new face here and a new face there, and one old face has... Quit? Retired? Been fired? Who knows...