Sound like that's exactly what they're doing.

No offence, but that's usually how capitalism works, the least talented are the first to go - unless we're talking about Twitter and then it's about showing off at the office.

Never in any layoff I've been a part of, have the least talented workers been let go first. It's usually by category: contractors, age (early-retirement), department, or job description.

I've seen some layoffs and the first to go where the people the most "unproductive". So, there were sale people (which were actually pretty decent, but they "cost" money and had to go), and then there were also people who were just "less" good. Less senior, more junior and could not do things autonomously.

But I can agree that it's always very subjective and of course the one who is friend with the boss ABC will have more chance despite maybe performing less good...

I have seen a lot of layoffs over the years and I would put the main targets into here buckets:

1. People with bad relationships with he boss and bosses boss. 2. People with higher salaries. 3. Unlucky folks where an entire line of business or corporate department is shut down.

Number 1 is the vast majority of the cases. Make sure your boss smiles when they see you and you can sleep well at night.

This is the fundamental conceit of stack-ranking layoffs, which Microsoft did annually for many years.

Don't forget "most talented people who accept the severance pay and get another job" from the pre-layoff voluntary departure.

You can do early-retirement by age but if you do lay-offs by age that's going to be an age-discrimination problem if you target >40.

I highly doubt that's true. It may be what you want in an ideal world, but in reality, very few, if any, companies of this size have any internal ranking system that can accurately identify the 1000 least talented people company-wide. More likely, they're laying off the last 1000 hired if they want to optimize for losing the least institutional knowledge, the first 1000 hired if they want to optimize for immediate labor cost savings, or just laying off all the people that are part of teams working on projects that got scrapped, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In larger companies, for some values of “talented” that comprises non-technical factors like political acumen, yes. If the “talented” label is meant as a shorthand for some kind of meritocratic scale, then I have my doubts about that.

I’ve long since lost my astonishment at the revealed preferences in layoff selection criteria. It isn’t a complete Machiavellian free-for-all, but merit and fine-grained logic usually don’t prevail at the top of the criteria list in the trenches.

If your statement is true, then the inverse must also hold: hiring is based on merit, which we all know to be untrue.

I've heard people claim this, but I've never actually seen it happen in practice.