this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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Slashing 10% of your workforce annually is something Jack Welch thought of when he was CEO of General Electric; essentially it shifts that 10% of staff overhead cost straight to profits per year.
The justification they give for the figure is that it's the lowest performing 10% according to internal key performance indicator (KPI) metrics. What this effectively does is two fold:
Anyone who's focusing on delivering stuff the company needs long term isn't always or sometimes never will produce nice neat KPIs that can be measured along with the rest of the company. This means these people are under constant pressure and can often get swept up in the firings.
It makes KPIs, a measuring tool, the target which as any statistician will tell you that when you make the measurement a target it ceases to be a good measuring tool. Because everyone is automatically incentivised to deliver KPIs NOT the actual company deliverables that generate the added value and therefore the profit.
This means after 5 to 10 years of this cycle all that's left of the company's institutional knowledge is how to deliver for KPIs and the sycophants who best adapt to this reality. You get a hollowing out of the company.
If this AI fuelled trend keeps up then companies like Cisco and Meta will eventually implode at some point.
I remember the grocery store I worked at started posting the rate for each cashier of items scanned per minute logged into a register. They didn’t say anything about it, but I now realize they were probably leading into using that data as justification for something.
My dumbass 16 year old self thought “I’m going to get that number so high it breaks the system.” I would lock my station after the previous customer, and take a little time to face all of the UPC codes and look up produce codes and make a general strategy. Then, I would unlock the register, scan like a madman, then lock it and casually start bagging. The customers would get concerned they needed to hurry up based on my fervor, so I would tell them “Take all the time you need, see that show yesterday?”
Next time they posted the rankings, my number was 20x as high as second place. After a few weeks of getting my number a little higher each time, my boss’ boss came by and told me to knock it off since I was polluting their metrics. Next week no new rankings.
I like to think I inadvertently helped prevent KPI nonsense.
The thing is, that's not what layoffs are supposed to be. That's effectively firing someone for cause. Maybe in America the difference doesn't matter, but in the civilised world, at least in theory, it does. But in reality they can somehow get away with this and call it "layoffs".
If a company does layoffs, they should not be allowed to hire any staff in the same or similar roles for 12 months.
Either that, or the laid-off workers should get right of first refusal for the positions. (Along with some additional incentive for the company not to game it.)
It also fosters a culture of non-cooperation with colleagues (because they are now your competition), where workers and teams try to sabotage each other, or at least not help, and throw each other under the bus. So there's mutual mistrust too. And no one wants to take a risk and innovate, leading to further stagnation.
But that will be a problem for the next guy.
I think we are already seeing that with Microsoft. Another 2-3 rounds of AI and they forget how to build windows.
Are you telling me they ever knew how to build Windows?
With Meta it very much looks like overhiring. What are those 8000 workers even doing, designing CSS for each individual ad on Facebook?
Implementing additional forms of wankery in the "Metaverse".
This blows my mind when I try to think about it. And this is only 10% of a supposed 80,000 globally. Facebook owns a bunch of companies though so I’m assuming they’re being counted too. Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, etc
I actually think a few % a year is healthy (1% feels right to me). I work at a company where we never lay anyone off and it’s led to a bunch of deadweight in the company that make work harder for everyone else. You gotta have some mechanism to let low performers go.
10% is way too high though
That's called "firing for cause."
Of course, that actually has accountability attached to it. Misusing layoffs for that purpose is an end-run around that accountability, which is why sociopathic corporations prefer it.
It should be case by case. Simple as that.
God willing