Week 10: The layoff list

The record of 2025 and 2026, dated and sourced, and how the lists were actually built. No mechanism this week, because no trick reaches it.

11 May 2027

No mechanism this week.

There is a record to read instead.

In January 2025 Meta cut about five percent of its staff and called them low performers; a year later it cut a tenth of one division and, in May 2026, about ten percent of the company, and neither of those was about performance. In January 2025 Microsoft confirmed performance-based cuts of under one percent; in April it introduced a policy under which a flagged employee chooses between an improvement plan and a voluntary exit, with a two-year rehire ban; in May and July it cut about six thousand and nine thousand people, and its chief executive wrote that the cuts were weighing on him. In October 2025 Amazon cut fourteen thousand corporate roles, and in January 2026 sixteen thousand more, in a memo about layers and AI. By mid-2026 a running list of companies citing AI for cuts included Oracle, Salesforce, Cisco and Cloudflare.

Read the sources. Then notice what they have in common: a percentage, a function, a cost, a memo. Ratings appear in some of them as the framing. In none of them are ratings the mechanism. Datta and colleagues’ 2010 review of ninety-one studies of downsizing found the decision is driven by cost, by what other firms are doing and by the share price, and that it rarely delivers what it promised; Sucher and Gupta’s shorter review found the same. In neither is the performance of the people cut an input. The person with the best rating on the team is on the list when the team is.

Outline

Sources

Teaching team