It&#x27;s true that you do what you can to hold onto your top 1-5% of employees - but, I&#x27;ve been through two <i>real</i> layoffs - one at Netscape, and one at Loudcloud, very little differentiation occurs below that layer.  At Netscape, when Microsoft effectively killed the browser-as-a-product space by giving theirs away for free, entire buildings were let go, and all the client side developers, and wan-dialer people, customer service, sales - 100% of the divisions were just gone, with pretty much zero concern as to how &quot;good&quot; they were.<p>Same thing at Loudcloud, 1&#x2F;3 of the company that had revenue bearing jobs went to EDS, 1&#x2F;3 of the back-end developers went to Opsware, and then the other 1&#x2F;3 (including everyone in the field, all the service delivery&#x2F;sales teams&#x2F;support) - were just let go, with very little attention to how good they were.<p>The difference between these types of these &quot;real&quot; layoffs, and &quot;faux&quot; layoffs, is that in &quot;real layoffs&quot; - companies will try and fight to hold onto the top 5%, but the bottom 95% are let go.  In the &quot;faux&quot; layoffs, the bottom 5-10% are let go, but the top 90% are basically okay.<p>Of course, the reality is that it&#x27;s never totally black and white, and any real world reductions-in-force are is likely to be some combination of these two, which is why I like the term &quot;Reduction in Force&quot; rather than &quot;Layoffs&quot; - though there are probably some legal reasons why companies use the exact word &quot;layoffs&quot;