I suppose it's not a broadly discussed topic, but it's definitely a thing. HR or recruiting teams would speak best to it. But you can spot this pretty easily. A recent example is Uber. When you do a big lay off followed by accelerated hiring, it's signaling the end of a talent drought. You can't performance manage very aggressively in a period of crisis since it's really hard to hire. So the bar goes down. At some point you clean up, and bring the bar back up. Uber couldn't hire well at all for several years as they went through their culture struggles.

It's definitely less of a problem for lower skilled jobs. And that makes sense since the labour is a lot more replaceable. But it's also why unions are there to prevent abuse.

I won't pretend to claim the system works perfectly. My point is just that there are levers there already that work pretty well. And we should decide as a society how to play or add levers. Managing by mod is really a dictatorship run by the angriest twitter users. If that's who we want running the show - I think that should at least be put to a vote... I'm definitely against it.