There is a sense of unfairness in these layoffs... It is also unfair that people are not given proper compensation for being laid off.
But let’s be fair: when I joined 15 years ago, it was explained to me that, really, the ranking is there for EM to identify the top for Dallas level senior management and the bottom to be ready for the next lay-off. The old forced ranking system was there to select the bottom 3-5-10-15 % or whatever management wanted to let go. So, the old EM, brutal as it was had a system prepared. Moreover, to avoid the small a...hole effect (aka any 1st or 2nd supervisor punishing anybody that they did not like) one could only move so many points in the ranking each year. Brutal but some sense of fairness.
In their infinite wisdom the new nobodies with Texan or British accent that run the company - and their HR - forgot about these principles when they decided to have buckets, to pretend that it is a new and friendlier system (which first line supervisors love since it is also less work for them - it is enough to put a person in a bucket instead of ranking her vs others in the same bucket, thus the enthusiasm). And they put the NSI to 5% (not 3% that was before).
Separately though they realized that the numbers did not work. How are you going to cut OPEX by 15%? Simple math. And this happened BEFORE COVID by the way.
So, oops, we need to fire more. So, we cannot go back to the old system so let’s tell everybody to put 8% in the NSI bucket.
This is what happened. And of course, since some supervisors are nasty, they paid back middle third employees that they disliked by putting them down to NSI.
The company had to act to fix OPEX. We do have indeed low performers. So simple.
Of course, we all know that we are where we are not because of them but because of the decisions of managers that the “inbreeding” promotes.