Layoffs in particular are like this because they're planned very quickly by very small groups of people. Rumors of impending layoffs obliterate morale, so the people in charge do everything they can to maintain secrecy and minimize the time between people hearing about layoffs and the layoffs taking effect. This basically always translates to random-seeming decisions - priority 1 is to cut costs by X amount, choosing the right people to cut is secondary. This means that, for example, engineers that have received performance-based raises are punished since, on paper, they do the same job as lower-performing but lower-paid engineers.
Not defending the process(the right way to break this equilibrium is statutory requirements for layoffs a la the WARN act) but that's why you see the outcomes you do.
In this particular case the impending layoff was basically obvious to everyone months in advance (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42893463).
> Rumors of impending layoffs obliterate morale
Granted, but it seems like the current way of salary-first, performance-blind cutting obliterates it even harder.
Really, all options obliterate morale.
Laying off people who you rank as "low end" on the acceptable performance scale, might mean you kill structurally important bricks that were not optimizing for being higher than "high enough" on that scale, and cannibalizes people working on anything valuable long-term but hard to justify to management short-term.
Laying off high performers means people don't want their head to be poking up, so they sabotage their own visibility to try being "good enough", while also killing people's motivations.
Laying off randomly kills people's morale directly worst of all, because that implies there's nothing they can do to change the outcome, and impotence is worse, arguably, than anything else for many people.
Any style of layoff is going to be bad for morale, but rumors floating around tank morale for as long as those rumors exist, and then moral takes another hit on the actual day. In that way it makes sense to just rip the Band-Aid off.
Of course, if you ask me, a more sensible plan to keep morale and lower costs would be getting rid of a few executives, but what do I know? I'm just a number on a spreadsheet.
Managers don't have the kind of information necessary to plan layoffs that don't seem random. Anything they know is already being used for the usual hiring/promotion/compensation adjustment process.
It seems rather disappointing if typical management would make such impactful decisions so rapidly that their "on paper" analysis couldn't be made clever enough to consider more than a single variable.