Who Gets Cut In A Layoff?

We explain how companies decide who gets laid off and why, from the outside, the process often feels random and opaque.

• There is no universal rule for layoff selection, as decisions vary heavily by company, leadership style, and timing, making it impossible for individual contributors to reliably predict outcomes.
• Common factors considered include performance, the business importance of a team, seniority, and tenure, but each of these can cut both ways depending on company priorities and cost pressures.
• From an individual contributor’s perspective, mass layoffs often feel random because decisions are made quickly, by very few executives, and with incomplete information to avoid panic.
• At large companies, layoffs are often driven by shareholder or board pressure to improve profitability, while startups are guided by burn rate, runway, and investor feedback in a tighter funding environment.
• Layoffs can also be opportunistic, used to trim perceived excess, remove deprioritized teams, or reset perks, with additional randomness introduced by legal safeguards like manager quotas to reduce lawsuit risk.