This article: "Wouldn't it be cool if when you measure employee performance, it turned out to fit a Pareto distribution better than a Gaussian?"

Would that be cool? We could posit the implications of all sorts of improbabilities. But I feel more strongly about how cool it would be that P = NP.

All this aside, being laid off sucks - being pushed out, even when you're a high performer, sucks even more. The truth is that "data science" does not help you process grief the way reading Dostoevsky does, so maybe getting an A in your liberal arts education is valuable even when you are working as a software developer.