The key definition people are missing here is "good performing". What does that mean? In times of macroeconomic certainty, companies are going to focus on core revenue generating business. It makes a ton of sense that some OSS folks got fired, because OSS doesn't generate revenue. Managed services generate revenue.
Whatever the messaging may be, I can assure you, MS is using this as an opportunity to clean house of low performers and particularly low-revenue generating teams, see: HoloLens team.
Consider this: you have a high-performer and a low-performer. You have a mandate to reduce your team size by 1. Who do you choose?
No matter what language they use e.g., layoffs, the net result is still the same. People who aren't having as high impact or on high revenue generating services are going to get culled. I'm assuming the same is going to hold true for Google, Amazon, whatever... if they don't do that, they're at a competitive disadvantage.
> Consider this: you have a high-performer and a low-performer. You have a mandate to reduce your team size by 1. Who do you choose?
This isn't how layoffs work. They don't to go each manager and tell them to reduce their team by X - that does happen, but it happens by way of managing people out for performance reasons, and it's not called layoffs. It's firing/unregretted attrition.
What happened here (at least at Google and Amazon) is that a relative handful of upper management worked with a relative handful of people in HR to use some formula to identify thousands of people to lay off. They definitely targeted some projects more than others, and entire projects/orgs/divisions were scrapped as part of it.
> ... if they don't do that, they're at a competitive disadvantage.
There's general agreement within Google that this absolutely puts us at a competitive disadvantage. Googlers in good standing and with years of knowledge about our business and systems were let go. When (if?) the economy recovers, we'll hire new people to do the same job, but worse.
It isn't being driven by competitive factors, it's being driven by a combination of profit-seeking and workforce-cowing.
