If your paycheck is bigger than most, brace yourself. Management doesn’t care about loyalty. They’ll cut the highest-paid first without blinking. It’s frustrating, unfair, and exhausting. Keep your resume ready and don’t kid yourself thinking it won’t happen to you.
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@bk then explain why we still have VPs reporting to VPs
I forgot everyone’s pay was public so we know only high earners get laid off. Makes total sense.
@dr VPs don’t have access to all those details, it’s worked through Hr and the OTS team. The data is influenced through the Business HR partner.
One of the hidden column in that excel is age and other hidden columns are all DEI related data.
Someone in our all hands ask our VP to publish data on layoff, off course he deflected.
@bk wow you have no idea how Layoffs work at Nike! Last reorg they got rid of all directors that held the teams together , had so much knowledge and were advocates for employee development. This had a huge impact on the culture in our team.
In my experience, enterprise (esp. tech) orgs typically lay off entire groups that were working on deprioritized and/or loss leading initiatives, sometimes even transferring or quickly hiring back the top talent into groups in other areas. Unfortunately, Nike is still using the JD/Bain/McKinsey management consulting spreadsheet approach described below, where short term cost cutting is the only objective and outcome. A truly transformative objective should be eliminating the projects and teams that are truly causing the losses that “necessitated” the cuts in the first place. Root cause analysis is not in Nike’s playbook, and the embedded external consultants and experts that used to impartially identify and solve underlying technology and business problems for Nike are long gone. In 2025, JDI just means grinding.
100%. And if you are over 40 or 50, look out.
Everyone over 50 in my group was let go.
OP is right... it's an Excel spreadsheet sorted by salaries and compared to what the industry pays.
I wish wish you were right @bk but in my experience that's not the case at all, a LOT of people were let go that were high performers in critical areas and even some recent ones where they were the acknowledged SME's in their area.
In my experience managing these processes, high earners aren’t the ones specifically targeted. Layoff decisions are usually about redundancy, business priorities, or performance, not just pay. In fact, higher paid employees often have critical skills, leadership, and client relationships that make them too valuable to cut. It’s almost always about the role, not the salary