I think one of the problems is that they are about as good at identifying talent as they are at laying off underperforming developers.

One of my friends has worked at the same place for 10+ years, dodging several layoffs. When he talks about layoffs it seems pretty random who gets the stick.

He doesn't have the complete picture though, so they might very well be great developers, but still underperforming...

There's also some obvious issues with the way they do layoffs. Like, say there's a 10% cut target. They typically make every leader hit that target. Even if one team has, say, 30% of their devs underperforming, and another team has 0%.

And, of course, the idea that every leader even has a reasonable idea of their developers' performance. They don't. And they protect or punish people for all sorts of reasons, often unrelated to performance.

> When he talks about layoffs it seems pretty random who gets the stick

Because it mostly is.

It is usually not that random.

People get laid off from low impact projects/teams. People working on higher profile, more important projects get to stay, even if they're objectively worse than those who got laid off.

There are obviously exceptions, like strict "lay off 10% of all teams" type of layoffs, or a family business firing everyone who's not family, or Elon Musk firing anyone who disagrees with him.