Layoffs is how to get rid of your worst workers, pay cut is how to get rid of you best.

As pithy two edged maxims go, that is dull and chipped on both sides.

Recent layoffs have indiscriminately targeted talent and pay cuts deter those that are primarily driven by returns.

Not true from the anecdotes, and admittedly just anecdotes, that I've seen. Top performers get some token, Approved by Legal™, <2% cut to avoid it being classified as a low performer firing, with a larger but still proportional percent coming from middle performers, and the the vast majority of the layoff percent consisting of low performers.

Well, then I'll give you more anecdotes: I've been through, in one way or another, three layoffs in the last 7 years, and none of them were performance based.

Agreed. In my defense, I was responding to a pretty dull comment.

No worries, we've all been there :)

Layoffs get rid of both ends, as well. Don't fool yourself here.

Yep. First place I worked, they did some layoffs. After that, some of the best people started trickling out.

Layoffs show the company isn't in a good place, so the best people start looking for better opportunities early, to avoid still being around when it gets even worse.

> Pay cuts are better than layoffs.

Unfortunately, I highly doubt that. With pay cut, comes a huge drop in morale across all the employees. Highly performers even consider leaving, and some employees leave.

After a layoff, the rest of the employees are more productive and the company gets to decide which employees to lay off (depending on business needs, comp-to-productivity, or whatever else).

> That said, investors need to take a paycut in dividends as well.

Totally agreed. As an investor and an employee, I feel sad to see my peers be laid off just so that a company can pay the same dividends and maintain earnings.

> With pay cut, comes a huge drop in morale across all the employees.

Layoffs also create huge general morale drops, greater the more the company has succeeded in the near universal practice of trying to get people to treat the company as a surrogate family.

True but with layoffs the company can choose the people to remove, with broad pay cuts they likely lose their best staff.

Not in this case because the layoffs might result in a sustainable business but a paycut never will because the low comp workers left simply can’t run a globally competitive business. Intel itself wouldn’t even exist today if it didn’t layoff the great majority of its entire workforce some decades back.

Layoffs are inevitable at Intel it’s more a question of timing.

Intel already had layoffs - it's almost periodic at this point.

Not for your best people that weren't in danger of being laid off...