I imagine it's mostly going to be folks who were planning to leave anyway, and this is the nudge they needed to do it sooner.
The downside to this approach is that they will probably tilt more towards senior and staff engineers who have been driving important projects and likely were going to leave once the project ships (or cancels).
Now, they leave 6 months earlier, and leave teams full of new or junior level employees without much context. The company is full of smart folks though and they will recover. It will just be a painful year as teams scramble to figure everything out.
It's also a potential F-U to Meta's approach who just did broadcasted performance based layoffs. Future employees will keep note and it will make it harder for Meta to recruit.
This kind of nonsense was definitely a factor in cancelling my upcoming Meta interviews.
I'd like to think that if I (or anyone) was not performing up to par, our managers would TELL US instead of the CEO deciding to do a layoff and character assassination. One of these is productive, the other one puts on a show for Wall Street at the expense of your employees.
It didn't help that Meta demanded that I re-interview for the same level that I interviewed for and they offered me two years ago, either.
I've been fortunate that my manager previously told me "if you're surprised at the performance review, I've failed at my job". That feels like the right approach - everyone should know their situation as soon as something starts going wrong, not suddenly at company-level layoffs.
The downside to this approach is that they will probably tilt more towards senior and staff engineers who have been driving important projects and likely were going to leave once the project ships (or cancels).
Now, they leave 6 months earlier, and leave teams full of new or junior level employees without much context. The company is full of smart folks though and they will recover. It will just be a painful year as teams scramble to figure everything out.
It's also a potential F-U to Meta's approach who just did broadcasted performance based layoffs. Future employees will keep note and it will make it harder for Meta to recruit.