No, do not listen to the fear-mongering. There is no conspiracy to lay people off and disguise it as performance issues. Do you realize how stupid that is? We could do that maybe for 1 or 2 employees before an obvious pattern began to emerge and earns us regulatory scrutiny. Why would we risk that sort of legal exposure to save on severance packages? If we don't want to offer severance we'll just not offer severance; that's completely our choice and just what we do to take care of our employees. And for the record, we often still pay severance to people even when we fire them for performance-based reasons. People are coming here and telling you likes, plain and simple.
There will be no systematic firing of employees anytime in the near future. No bogus performance firings either. I am in a position to know and would give it to you straight if that weren't the case. If you are being fired for performance issues, you will see it coming from a long way away.