Name: Who Gets Cut In A Layoff?
Uploaded: 2026-01-04T11:57:28+00:00
Duration: 12 min 22 s
Description: We explain how companies decide who gets laid off and why, from the outside, the process often feels random and opaque

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.

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