Sadly the worst thing WF can do for a team member is keep them on the payroll. We are all operating at a minimal pulse rate. Yes it is stressful to get let go unexpectedly, but more often than not it opens doors, it creates opportunities. In tech I know of less than 5 people who moved internally in 20+ years from technical to management. Is that really a good thing though? Jury is out!
What is the incentive to stay at WF and do your very best? There is no corporate ladder to climb. All that remains is parallel and sideways work; sweeping sand at the beach. The main incentive for over 20 years has been all about pay. This is the only important metric, not your performance rating, not whether you have friends at work, not because you are being watched as a good candidate for a better role, not because you single handedly showed up and interrupted your personal life off hours to prevent an outage from costing the bank x dollars in downtime.
But WF doesn't have a pay incentive, it keeps you in the 1-2.5% merit increase range each year, year after year after year.
Most of us need WF to nudge us out the door no matter if strategic or seemingly random. While I am still here on the mothership, I do not really care anymore about the reasons for why. It is not my job to work around layoffs and cover up holes. What is the incentive to do so? There is none.
This was too good to stay buried in the comments from a few weeks ago. Bumped from @1jxg+1lKxzfaH.