Comment by kndyry

Their peers will learn that 'screw ups' on whatever arbitrary scale, which are as common as human, will be punished by loss of employment, plus all of the negatives that status carries. This will teach them to become militantly risk averse and, by proxy, utterly afraid of and resistant to change. Meanwhile, the folks you let go, the ones who truly learned the lesson, end up using their newfound experience to improve processes elsewhere.