What a few rounds of layoffs have taught me

Our company had layoffs this week. That sentence does not help you narrow down which company I mean, and that is the part worth sitting with.

Tech cut more than 124,000 jobs in the first seven months of this year, already past the total for all of 2025.¹ The hires rate has been at levels last seen in 2011, and quits are at their lowest since 2020.² Fewer people are being hired, fewer people can leave, and the cuts keep coming anyway.

To be blunt, I think they are here to stay. As an engineer to myself, a leader to some, and hopefully a friend to those affected, that is the hardest part to swallow. So this is not advice for anyone going through their first one. It is for the people who have done a few rounds of these, and it is as much a retrospective on how I feel as it is on what I have learned.

It does not get easier. Your familiarity does. The first thing you can do is be honest with yourself and admit that this just sucks. One of my critical motivations for working hard as a leader is giving the people around me a sense of job security, because that is the first order of assurance before anyone gets to the good part of committing to their own growth. So embrace the feeling and go easy on yourself and on others. If you have been here before you start wondering why it is getting easier, and sitting with that this week I worked out that it is not getting easier, it is just getting familiar. Like stubbing your toe. I feel frustrated at it now instead of feeling dread from it. That is not the same as being fine.

Take your time on the next steps. I learned this one after my first round as an engineering leader. You want to explain the path forward quickly and be the cape of good hope that other people can moor their worries to. I am a lot more apprehensive about jumping into reaction mode now, until I have taken a moment to work out my own take on what comes next. Talk to your skips. Extrapolate how this changes the makeup of the objectives. Come to terms with whether you are still betting on this place, the mission, and the people. Until then it is fine to ask your directs for some grace, and to ask them to follow through on what they already promised to deliver. It gives them normality and gives you the time you need to prepare.

It is a moment to capture growth in scope. Layoffs are an economic outcome, not necessarily one driven by what is best for the operational continuity of the business. That means there will be vacuums of work that simply needs to get done. I would not use it as a moment to ask for a dramatic shift in your job function, but it is a good time to reinvent the scope of the job you have, which gives you an organic path to grow as an engineer and as a leader.

If you commit to building your skills you will keep being okay. Sometimes you are not in a position to take on more scope and grow organically. Rather than feeling despondent, as though you are now in a self-fulfilling prophecy about being impacted next time, build your skills on purpose. As an engineering leader I am shipping more code than I have in a while, because I am genuinely curious about beating my own assumptions on how plugged in I am to the contemporary truth of the skills I would put on my resume. Nobody is stopping you from building yourself, and in an industry this full of transformation that is table stakes.

If you have been laid off and you are reading this, please reach out so I can help. If you have not, I would still like to have the conversation, and I assume you would rather have it privately. Not the version you would post. What this characteristic of our industry is actually teaching you, professionally and personally.

Footnotes

1. Layoffs.fyi, 2026 Tech Layoffs, tracked through July 2026. ↩

2. Indeed Hiring Lab, February 2026 JOLTS Report: Stuck in Neutral, March 2026. ↩