>2. Why on Earth does your friend think having multiple rounds of layoffs will convince poor performers to resign?

for the sake of playing devil's advocate, i'd like to remind that poor performers may not see that same image when they look in the mirror.

it's likely that they too will experience the same dread and despair as anyone else might when they are confronted by the very real future prospect of unemployment.

> If anything, it's usually the crappiest people who are OK stocking around when a company becomes paralyzed...

Don't assume that.

Not everyone can just hop into a new job. Some top performers, who are deep into their career, need to invest a lot of time in their job searches.

If finding a new job takes someone 160+ hours, it's impractical to do that while doing honest work for their employer. People have families and other things to do outside of work.

That's why negotiating a severance package is a thing.

User serf already covered, but I'll go into detail.

1 - because even during a mass layoff, theres always a threat of a lawsuit. Sure, it may not go anywhere, but as already mentioned, defending is costly. An employee that decides to leave on their own volition is no risk. Plus, laying off people has in some states some remuneration and compliance requisites. Unemployment hearings that tie up senior staff and can be a time drain. Then theres fringe benefits. And of course, there's morale, reputation, and other intangible costs like IP loss and making an unwanted enemy or even encouraging a scrappy conpetitor. Its infinitely cheaper and desirable to get someone to leave vs termination.

2 - Please see serf's post. In addition - High performers can also be those that actively prevent product from actually shipping, ensnaring the org in turf wars, and similar (typical) large org roadblocks.

To be clear, my worldview was that this premise was insane. I still think it is strange -based own personal experience- but im far less certain of its invalidity, and I am forced to acknowledge that the CEO has better information than I have. Perhaps I need to reconsider my position.

The personal traits required to find a job are different from that to perform well at a particular company & role. That's the sad truth. So, people voluntarily leaving won't be correlated with performance low or high. Also, people who were selected for layoff by management will also not be correlated to low performance well. In fact, in most layoffs, they are planned in closed rooms with only VP+ people who have little context of who does what work well or not, and with flawed performance calibration data. So, you will always be shocked to find that the people /you/ thought were high-performers were let go.

> If anything, it's usually the crappiest people who are OK stocking around when a company becomes paralyzed during layoffs season - it's top performers who see the writing on the wall and go elsewhere.

I'd like to amend that - it's not the lowest performers who stick around and the top performers who leave.

It's more, the poor-at-interviewing people who stick around and the good-at-interviewing people who leave.

I've worked with a shmuck who took two years to deliver a basic CRUD system that fell over at 10 req/sec [1], and then got hired at a another place as an architect (or team lead - I forget which).

[1] I did a similar one in about 3 months, and it handled more than 4 req/sec, without weird crashes.

> If you want to fire people for performance or other reasons, it's true that a great time to do it is during layoffs

That really depends on the jurisdiction, in Australia and mich of Europe you can't replace someone laid off for a certain amount of time.