No heuristic is perfect, but it's fairly easy to quantify empirically from activity/records. Developers who are productive (actually write and ship large amounts of quality code) tend to be valuable and those that don't, aren't.
That being said there are some intangibles, like morale etc. It's possible there are people that benefit the team while having low personal productivity.
But anyway, no need to approach in that way. There are probably entire branches of google that could be laid off without any material impact to revenues/profitability, thus all layoffs concentrated in single arm.
Crypto divisions could be cut at many companies without affecting their core businesses. Did Square need to rename itself to Block and add all kinds of crypto functions? How many hundreds of developers are working on that.
I don't think X% headcount cuts horizontally across the org are ever a good idea. Cut non-essential functions. And cut in core branches opportunistically based on low performance.
That being said there are some intangibles, like morale etc. It's possible there are people that benefit the team while having low personal productivity.
But anyway, no need to approach in that way. There are probably entire branches of google that could be laid off without any material impact to revenues/profitability, thus all layoffs concentrated in single arm.
Crypto divisions could be cut at many companies without affecting their core businesses. Did Square need to rename itself to Block and add all kinds of crypto functions? How many hundreds of developers are working on that.
I don't think X% headcount cuts horizontally across the org are ever a good idea. Cut non-essential functions. And cut in core branches opportunistically based on low performance.