TL;DR : if they are they are, if they aren't they will find out

From sources, its not surprising cause lot of people within the company knew about it already:

1. Managers were asked to provide mid year rating for their reports, this is not something that happens otherwise

2. Managers were asked to mark the reports which are not regrettable attrition

3. The biggest downside of all this is that it makes people to invest a lot more efforts on being in managers good list instead of focusing on doing a good job

The article says it's around 7% of their workforce. It seems that it could be realistic that this is a performance-based cut?

Amusing this LLM text recommends Realtor.com -- who had its own similar layoff round last week

Such a hard hitting article title with AI image slop that is a bit comical for something a bit serious. I get a tinge of AI writing in the article too. I use LLMs to proofread and look at my work but this feels like AI slop.

It’s just 7% of the workforce.

This piece would have been better if it had just been the prompts used to generate it. The entire underlying story is just "company does discretionary RIF".

Some of these generated stories pay their freight on HN, because they develop genuinely interesting technical[†] ideas (I'd still like to see the prompts, if I can't get the story in the author's own words). But when the story contains essentially no interesting content, it starts to make sense to consider them off-topic.

† usually! I'm equally into genuinely interesting LLM-generated explanations of thoughts on modernist poetry, I guess.

I got too distracted by the AI generated image at the top to read the AI generated article.

I think Zillow would be more efficient without a certain CEO. He earns 14M per year. https://www.erieri.com/executive/salary/jeremy-wacksman-apxd Meaning the company would probably reduce more expense just getting rid of him.

I feel there's something in this article, but the meandering really ruins it. Either way, it's obvious that no earnings call would explain the metrics or decisions behind a layoff. But at 7% this is well within "Eh, we want to try a performance layoff and hope we get a better 7% of new hires".

It is too bad that people aren't more direct about this. But if folks remember Meta/FB's attempt at saying they did performance-based cuts, people ripped into them for labeling all the fired personnel as un-hireable. Earnings calls are heavy lawyered and regulated, so there's no reason to say anything.