I’m writing this in November 2022, and the layoff announcements are coming faster than I can track. Meta. Twitter. Stripe. Lyft. Dozens more. Having worked across different organizations, I have a strange vantage point – watching the same wave hit in different ways, seeing which ones handle it well and which ones make it worse.
This isn’t a framework post. It’s what I’ve seen and what I think matters.
The Shift Nobody Planned For
Eighteen months ago, every company I talked to was hiring aggressively. “We can’t find enough engineers” was the universal complaint. Now the complaint is “we hired too fast and the math doesn’t work.”
The market shifted from rewarding growth to rewarding efficiency. That’s a legitimate economic correction. But the speed of the pivot is brutal. Teams that were told to scale fast are now being told to do more with less, sometimes by the same leadership that set the original targets.
What I’ve Seen Go Wrong
The worst layoffs I’ve watched – and I’ve watched a few this year – share common traits.
Multiple waves. Nothing destroys trust faster than a “one-time reduction” followed by another one six weeks later. If leadership doesn’t know the full scope of cuts, they should say so honestly rather than promise stability they can’t guarantee.
Silence from above. At one organization I worked with, the engineering org learned about layoffs from Twitter before they heard from their own leadership. That isn’t a communication problem. That’s a respect problem.
Pretending the plan didn’t change. After cutting 20% of engineering, one organization kept the same roadmap and the same deadlines. The remaining team burned out within two months. Three more people left voluntarily. The original cost savings evaporated.
Knowledge walking out the door. I saw a team lose the only person who understood their payment processing pipeline. No documentation, no pairing history, no runbooks. Three months later they were still reverse-engineering their own system.
What I’ve Seen Go Right
The organizations that handled this well did a few things consistently.
They were honest about the business reason. Not corporate-speak, not “rightsizing for the future.” Honest: “Revenue is down, burn rate is too high, and we need to cut costs to survive.” People can handle hard truths. They can’t handle feeling manipulated.
They treated departing people with real dignity. Generous severance where possible. Genuine references. Time to say goodbye. The remaining team watches how you treat the people who leave. It tells them everything about what they can expect.
They immediately rescoped. Smaller team means smaller roadmap. Full stop. The best leader I watched through this process cancelled three initiatives within a week of the layoff, told the team “we’re doing these two things well, nothing else,” and stuck to it. That team stabilized faster than any other I saw.
For the People Who Remain
Survivor guilt is real and poorly understood. You kept your job, so you should be grateful, right? Except your friend got walked out, your workload doubled, and nobody has told you whether more cuts are coming. “Grateful” isn’t the word that comes to mind.
What actually helps:
Acknowledge the loss. Don’t skip past it. The people who left were colleagues, mentors, friends. Pretending everything is normal is insulting and counterproductive.
Reset expectations explicitly. What are we building? What are we not building? Who owns what now? If these questions aren’t answered within a week, anxiety fills the vacuum.
Protect sustainable pace. A smaller team carrying a larger roadmap is a team in the process of losing more people. Voluntary attrition after layoffs is the hidden second wave that leadership never budgets for.
Distribute Knowledge Before You Have To
The best insurance against knowledge loss isn’t documentation. It’s rotation. Pair on critical systems. Rotate on-call. Make sure at least two people can deploy, debug, and recover every service that matters.
I keep coming back to this: resilience isn’t about having a plan for when things go wrong. It’s about building systems – human systems – that can absorb shocks without collapsing. That means shared ownership, documented decisions, and deliberately avoiding single points of failure in your org chart.
For Leaders
You can’t control the macro environment. You can control how clearly you communicate, how honestly you scope, and how consistently you protect your team’s focus.
Watch for burnout signals: declining code quality, slower response times, people going quiet in meetings who used to speak up. These are leading indicators of the next round of attrition – the voluntary kind that hurts even more because it’s your best people who leave first.
Advocate upward for realistic expectations. If leadership expects the same output from a smaller team, push back with data. “We can deliver A and B by Q1, or A, B, and C by Q2. Pick one.” That isn’t defiance. That’s responsible leadership.
A Personal Note
Having gone through Entrepreneur First and built startups, I’ve been on the other side of this equation too – making hard calls about team size when the money is running out. It’s never clean. But the difference between organizations that recover and organizations that spiral comes down to honesty and scope discipline.
Heroics don’t scale. Discipline does. The teams that will come out of this cycle stronger are the ones that cut scope honestly, protected their people’s energy, and resisted the temptation to pretend nothing changed.