“The Great Turnover: 9 in 10 Companies Plan To Hire in 2026, Yet 6 in 10 Will Have Layoffs":

59% [of surveyed hiring managers] admit they emphasize AI when explaining hiring freezes or layoffs because it plays better with stakeholders than citing financial constraints

During the dotcom bust a company I worked for spent five or six months sliding all over the road with layoffs because its ad business was collapsing, but it kept underestimating the extent of the damage as non-renewals continued to pour in from tech companies that were bleeding out.

The layoffs – always two or three at a time across all the verticals – were like the old Russian folk tale about the man whose dog had a diseased tail: He couldn’t bring himself to cut the tail off, so he settled on slicing away a chunk of it each day. Every month, toward the end, I’d get a call telling me two or three people had gotten the axe (“but don’t worry – you’re fine! – I just need you to take over …")

They were taking a public beating for the chronic layoffs, though, so suddenly every dismissal was performance-related. Any semblance of dignity for those people went out the window as mid-level leadership informally let us all know that they had it coming but the company was fine. The company’s GC was happy to inform us all that if we provided references for any former colleagues we would enjoy no legal protection.

My breaking point: Being the last of two people on a former team of around 15, and learning the other guy lost his job because he hadn’t picked up the phone until the fifth ring the day prior. I don’t mean breaking point as in “I said fuck it, I quit.” I mean breaking point as in, “I need my job, so I’ll do what I can to keep it, but this is insane and stupid, so I won’t take it personally when it finally comes for me.”

Don’t get me wrong:

25 years later layoffs still make me nervous. I’ve been through enough, run some kind of operations for enough, or been one of the people going through the layoff rosters enough that I know how they work and what a thoroughly mid-wit or sociopathic cast of characters can end up with power over peoples' livelihoods.

I’ve sat in a room with a CEO telling all the senior directors she saw everyone else doing layoffs as a good reason to demand more than the business strictly needed. “The environment permitted me to take this opportunity.” The “environment” being the Covid pandemic, the “opportunity” being a rushed operation that went from “we need to cut from next year’s hiring plan” to “we need about 10% of the department” in under 24 hours, with an inept People team creating so many barriers to collaboration that engineering managers were cutting talent Product was roadmapping for. All while CNN was carrying footage of miles-long drive up food lines.

I can’t help anybody with the underlying sociopathy of capital. We’re all going to either collectively address it or not. After 25 years in and around tech, I’m just here to tell you I have no patience for the “get back to normal” wing of the Democratic party, because “normal” was always bad and unjust for working people.

What I can help with, I guess, is suggesting to someone who finds themselves out of work that it is not you.

It’s hard to remember that.

I’ve been on the wrong side of the layoff table once and am open to the possibility it will happen again. I knew when my layer-offer said “this is a business decision” that it wasn’t me. But there was some self-doubt there. I spent a little bit of time feeling a little wounded and wondering about all the ways I might have mis-managed my career.

So, it is one thing to wake up every morning thinking “I caught a bad break in a sociopathic system that uses buffering layers of bureaucracy to help middle managers rationalize the immiseration they’re dealing out,” and quite another to wake up thinking “an efficient and rational market has determined I am somehow to blame for day 189 of my unemployment, and I think it has a point.”

I’d encourage you to stick to the former. The scorpion stung you. That’s in its nature.