To Chidi Nnadozie: a befitting first boss for a lifetime.

You didn’t get laid off because you were bad at your job.

This sentence circulates through professional networks with the force of revelation, and something in it rings true. The people who lose their positions in corporate reductions rarely match the profile we’d expect if merit drove the process. They include top performers, devoted employees, people who canceled vacations and worked weekends. They include workers who received glowing reviews months before the ax fell. The disconnect between effort and outcome feels too consistent to be coincidence. But if merit doesn’t explain who loses their job, what does? The answer lies in understanding that layoffs operate according to a different logic than employment itself – a logic that treats human beings as line items in a financial equation, where the goal isn’t to identify who deserves to stay but to make certain numbers align. This isn’t a cynical observation so much as a structural one. Once you see how the machinery actually works, the apparent randomness of layoffs reveals itself as something more systematic and, in its own way, more troubling.

Cascade

Picture a conference room on an upper floor. The quarterly numbers came in below expectations, or the board expressed concern about runway, or a new CEO arrived with a mandate to cut costs. Whatever the trigger, a decision gets made: the company needs to reduce headcount by some percentage. Twelve percent, perhaps, or fourteen – numbers that cluster suspiciously around a narrow band, as if drawn from the same playbook. From that moment, a process unfolds that most employees never witness. Executives set the financial target. Human resources develops criteria and scoring systems. Managers are asked to propose names, though their advocacy carries less weight than they imagine. Legal reviews the emerging list for patterns that might suggest discrimination. A final committee approves the selections. By the time anyone learns their fate, the decision has already passed through multiple hands, each step adding distance between the human being losing their job and the people responsible for choosing them. Tomás spent eleven years at a logistics company in Phoenix, rising from warehouse coordinator to regional operations lead. When the reduction came, his manager told him – voice tight, eyes avoiding his – that the decision had come from “above.” Three levels above, as it turned out. The executive who approved the list had never met Tomás, couldn’t have picked him out of a lineup. She knew only that his department carried salary costs seventeen percent higher than the acquisition target they were trying to meet.

The criteria themselves reveal priorities that would surprise most workers. Companies build weighted scoring systems that evaluate skills alignment with future strategy, documented performance ratings, position redundancy, and sometimes seniority. The most legally defensible approach – and therefore the most common – eliminates entire positions or departments rather than selecting individuals within a team. This explains why stellar performers often find themselves cut alongside struggling colleagues. When a function gets eliminated, individual excellence becomes irrelevant. What doesn’t appear on these scoring rubrics? The late nights. The loyalty demonstrated over years. The personal sacrifices made for the company’s benefit. These factors exist in the emotional economy of work, not the spreadsheet economy of corporate restructuring. Ingrid, a product manager at a mid-sized software company, discovered she was near the top of the pay range for her level – and concluded that her compensation, not her performance, sealed her fate. She was producing similar output to colleagues who cost less. The math didn’t favor her. This reveals something uncomfortable about the nature of employment in large organizations. We experience our jobs as relationships – with colleagues, with managers, with the company itself. But the company, at least when it comes to reduction decisions, experiences us as resources with associated costs. The relationship metaphor and the resource metaphor coexist uneasily, and during layoffs, the latter wins.

Selection

If you asked workers what protects them from layoffs, most would name some combination of tenure, strong performance, and good relationships with management. The empirical picture is considerably more complicated. Start with tenure. The traditional assumption held that seniority provided insulation – last in, first out, as the saying goes. And there’s historical support for this. Studies tracking matched employer-employee data across countries found strong evidence that workers hired last generally leave first. But this pattern is weakening. Companies increasingly emphasize skills-based selection, asking not “who has been here longest?” but “who possesses the capabilities we’ll need going forward?” Longevity is no longer the free pass it once was. The tenure question carries a hidden dimension that rarely gets discussed. Workers with longer tenure tend to have accumulated firm-specific knowledge – expertise that’s valuable at their current employer but transfers poorly elsewhere. When these workers do get laid off, they face larger average wage reductions in their next position. The very loyalty that was supposed to protect them becomes a liability on the open market. Years spent mastering internal systems, navigating company politics, and building institutional knowledge yield skills with limited portability. Kenji had been at his aerospace firm for sixteen years. He knew which vendors actually delivered on time, which internal approval processes could be expedited, which engineers to call at 7am when a crisis hit. None of this knowledge existed in any document. It lived in him. When the layoff came, headhunters kept asking about his “hard skills” – software proficiencies, certifications, quantifiable outputs. The soft infrastructure he’d built over a decade and a half didn’t fit on a resume.

Performance presents an even more counterintuitive picture. The assumption that high performers are safe dissolves under examination. During targeted reductions, workers who exceeded expectations proved more likely to be let go than those who merely met them – because exceeding expectations often correlates with higher compensation. Strong performance got them raises and promotions; those raises and promotions made them expensive; expense made them targets. The very success that seemed to guarantee security created vulnerability. Ramona had been the top salesperson in her division three years running. Her reward: a salary forty percent above median for her title. When the reduction came, her numbers worked against her. One junior rep could be kept for what she cost. Her excellence had priced her out. When entire departments get eliminated, of course, performance becomes completely irrelevant. No amount of excellence protects you if the company decides it no longer needs your function. And increasingly, companies blur the line between layoffs and performance terminations. They announce “performance-based” reductions that sweep up workers with recent positive reviews, using the language of merit to justify what are fundamentally financial decisions. Performance becomes the scapegoat. If these workers weren’t performing, the company would have fired them already through normal channels. Consider the worker who receives strong reviews, earns consistent bonuses, gets promoted on schedule – and then finds themselves on a layoff list alongside colleagues who coasted. The system that rewarded their effort for years suddenly operates by different rules. The betrayal they feel isn’t irrational; it reflects a genuine inconsistency between how companies evaluate workers for advancement and how they evaluate workers for elimination.

Spreadsheet

Here’s where the logic of layoffs becomes genuinely puzzling. If workforce reductions were purely financial decisions, we’d expect companies to carefully calculate whether the savings justify the costs. Layoffs frequently fail to deliver their promised financial returns. The immediate costs are substantial. A company laying off ten thousand workers might spend over a billion dollars on severance and related charges – roughly six figures per person. But these visible costs pale against the hidden ones. Productivity among remaining employees drops measurably in the aftermath of layoffs. The survivors work in an atmosphere of anxiety, wondering if they’ll be next. They’ve lost colleagues whose expertise they relied on. They’re often asked to absorb the work of departed teammates without additional compensation. Morale suffers. Engagement declines. The remaining workforce is smaller but also less effective. Beatrice stayed. She’d survived three rounds of cuts at her marketing agency, and each time, her relief curdled into something else within weeks. The first time, she inherited two accounts from a departing colleague. The second time, four. After the third round, she was running what had been a three-person function alone. She left at 6:47pm most nights feeling she’d done nothing well. The company had kept her but gotten less of her – the part that used to generate ideas, that found energy in collaboration, had gone somewhere she couldn’t locate anymore.

Voluntary turnover surges. A ten percent reduction in workforce can trigger nearly fifty percent increase in voluntary departures. The layoff itself signals instability; talented workers who have options exercise them. The company loses not only the people it chose to cut but also people it wanted to keep. And because voluntary departures skew toward workers with the best external prospects, the talent drain concentrates among exactly the employees the company most needed to retain. Rehiring follows. Three-quarters of companies that conduct layoffs rehire for the same positions within a year. The workers they cut get replaced by workers who need to be recruited, hired, onboarded, and trained – at a cost of roughly 1.25 times annual salary per replacement. The savings that justified the layoffs evaporate in replacement expenses. Stock markets have grown increasingly skeptical. Analysis of thousands of layoff announcements found an overall negative effect on stock prices. Investors can distinguish between layoffs that reflect genuine strategic repositioning and layoffs that amount to panic cost-cutting. The latter signal trouble rather than prudence. When companies announce reactive layoffs in response to declining performance, stock prices drop significantly. Only proactive restructuring – layoffs that accompany clear strategic shifts – generate positive reactions, and even these gains prove modest.

So why do companies keep doing this? The answer involves quarterly earnings pressure, executive imitation, and a peculiar feature of corporate accounting. Layoffs produce an immediate, visible reduction in one specific expense category. The hidden costs – productivity decline, voluntary turnover, rehiring expenses, loss of institutional knowledge – show up in different places over longer time horizons. An executive facing a bad quarter can point to headcount reduction as decisive action. The costs that follow become someone else’s problem. There’s also a copycat dynamic at play. When prominent companies announce layoffs, others follow regardless of their own financial situation. Companies simply copy each other because they can. The first movers provided cover; the followers avoided looking soft. The layoffs spread through the industry like contagion rather than strategy. Only a small fraction of cost-cutting layoffs remain effective after three years. The immediate accounting bump fades. The long-term damage persists. Yet the pattern continues because the incentives facing individual executives diverge from the incentives facing the organization as a whole.

New Landscape

The recent wave of layoffs across the technology sector offers a case study in how these dynamics play out at scale. After years of aggressive hiring – companies doubling headcount in the belief that growth would continue indefinitely – the corrections came suddenly and severely. Tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs each year from 2022 through 2025, with the peak arriving in 2023 when over a quarter million people in tech alone received termination notices. The execution of these layoffs grew increasingly impersonal. Workers learned their fate through morning emails directing them to join brief audio calls. Some discovered they’d been cut when their access to work systems was revoked. The in-person conversation with a manager giving bad news directly – always difficult, often awkward – gave way to mass communications delivered at scale. The same efficiency mindset that shaped the selection process shaped the notification process. Yusuf’s Tuesday started normally. Coffee at 7:15am, quick scan of Slack, then a meeting invite that hadn’t been there the night before. “Please join this call at 8am PST – required.” No context. He clicked in to find a woman from HR he’d never met, reading from what was clearly a script. By 8:04am it was over. By 8:07am his laptop had been remotely locked. He sat in his home office, still holding the coffee he’d made, trying to understand how four years could end in the time it took to drink it. A pattern emerged that observers called “forever layoffs” – companies conducting small, continuous reductions rather than large, visible ones. These cuts stay below the thresholds that trigger legal notification requirements. They create what one analyst described as cultures of anxiety and insecurity. Workers never know if they’re next. The survivors live in permanent low-grade fear.

Remote workers faced particular vulnerability. Data covering millions of workers found fully remote employees were dramatically more likely to be laid off than hybrid or in-office colleagues – and significantly less likely to be promoted. The explanation isn’t that remote workers perform worse. It’s that they’re less visible to decision-makers. When executives compile layoff lists, they’re more aware of the accomplishments of workers they see regularly. Remote workers become abstractions, easier to eliminate because their presence is less felt. Odette had taken the remote position specifically because it let her care for her father during his chemotherapy. She’d been clear about this during hiring; her manager had called it “exactly the kind of flexibility we want to support.” Two years later, a new VP – someone who’d never visited the Detroit satellite office, never met the seven people who worked from there – cut the entire remote team. All of them. When Odette asked her manager what had happened to the flexibility they’d championed, he could only say the decision came from above. This creates a troubling dimension beyond individual unfairness. Remote work enabled participation by people with disabilities, caregivers, and workers in locations far from corporate offices. Targeting remote workers for layoffs disproportionately affects these populations. The efficiency of remote work – which companies celebrated when they wanted to reduce real estate costs – becomes a liability when companies want to reduce headcount. The psychological toll on laid-off workers extends far beyond temporary unemployment. People who lose their jobs are significantly more likely to experience anxiety and depression months after the event. Mental health service utilization spikes measurably in populations affected by displacement. And perhaps most striking, persistent job insecurity may be even more damaging to psychological wellbeing than actual job loss. The fear of losing your job, maintained over extended periods, erodes mental health more than the loss itself.

Portable Self

If job security is increasingly illusory, what replaces it? The emerging answer points toward what might be called career security – a form of professional resilience that doesn’t depend on any single employer. The distinction matters. Job security means confidence that your current position will continue. Career security means confidence that you’ll find meaningful work regardless of what happens to your current position. The first requires an employer to value you enough to keep you. The second requires the market to value you enough that someone will always want to hire you. What creates career security? Perhaps counterintuitively, technical skills matter, but less than we typically assume. The expertise that gets you hired – specific programming languages, particular software platforms, industry-specific knowledge – tends to depreciate rapidly. Technical skills acquired today become obsolete within roughly five years. Building your career security on technical mastery alone means running on a treadmill that keeps accelerating. Transferable capabilities prove more durable. The ability to communicate clearly, to solve novel problems, to lead groups of people toward shared goals, to adapt when circumstances change – these skills remain valuable across industries and through technological shifts. The overwhelming majority of career achievement derives from these softer capabilities rather than hard technical skills.

Professional networks carry enormous weight in career transitions. Most positions are never publicly advertised; they’re filled through connections. Candidates who arrive with an internal referral are dramatically more likely to get hired than those who apply through job boards. The familiar advice to network before you need favors reflects empirical reality. Workers who invest in relationships across their industry – not just within their current company – maintain access to opportunity flows invisible to those who relied entirely on their employer. Here’s a nuance that surprises many people: the most valuable network connections aren’t your closest friends. The majority of job seekers find that “moderately weak” ties – acquaintances rather than intimates – provide more job opportunities. Your close friends know mostly the same people you know; your acquaintances bridge into different networks. Maintaining a broad web of professional relationships, even relatively shallow ones, opens more doors than cultivating a few deep connections. Dmitri landed his next role through someone he’d met exactly once – a woman named Paloma he’d chatted with for ten minutes at an industry conference two years earlier. They’d connected on LinkedIn afterward, exchanged maybe three comments total since then. When her company started hiring, she thought of him. Not because they were close, but because he existed somewhere in her peripheral awareness, a name she vaguely associated with the skill set they needed. The job that changed his life came from someone who wouldn’t have recognized him on the street. Personal visibility – what some call personal branding – also predicts career resilience. Workers who maintain robust professional profiles, who share their thinking publicly, who establish reputations that extend beyond their current employer, attract opportunities that others never see. This feels uncomfortable to people who prefer to let their work speak for itself. But work doesn’t speak for itself; workers who actively manage their professional identities outperform those who don’t.

The traits that predict faster re-employment after layoffs tell a coherent story. The most powerful predictor isn’t credentials or experience but self-efficacy in job search – the confidence that your efforts will yield results. Job search intensity matters: people who treat finding work as their job, rather than passively waiting for opportunities, find positions faster. Flexibility in job type and location accelerates landing. Problem-focused coping – addressing circumstances rather than assigning blame – correlates with better outcomes. And emotional resilience, the ability to tolerate rejection and uncertainty without spiraling, makes the difference between people who persist until they succeed and people who give up. Age creates measurable disadvantage that honest analysis can’t ignore. The relationship between age and reemployment speed becomes dramatically stronger after fifty. Some of this reflects discrimination, which the data clearly shows persists. Some reflects that older workers, having built careers within particular industries, have developed expertise that transfers less easily. And some reflects lower job search intensity among older workers – possibly because experience has taught them to expect results from approaches that worked decades ago but work less well now. Henrik had been a senior architect at his firm for twenty-three years when the construction sector contracted. At fifty-seven, he found himself applying for positions where the hiring managers were half his age, using platforms that hadn’t existed when he’d last looked for work. His first instinct was to wait for the right opportunity to find him – that’s how it had always worked before. Three months of silence taught him that waiting no longer worked. He had to treat the search itself as his job, eight hours a day, reaching out to people rather than expecting them to reach out to him.

Actual Help

The mythology of employment security deserves dismantling, but not to leave workers feeling helpless. Agency exists – it’s just different from what most people assume. Start with visibility. The data on remote work and layoff risk suggests that physical presence matters, not because remote workers contribute less but because decision-makers are human and humans remember what they see. For workers in hybrid environments, the strategic choice is clear: show up. Make sure the people who will someday compile layoff lists know your face and recall your contributions. This feels political, and it is political, but pretending otherwise doesn’t help. Documentation helps more than most workers realize. The spreadsheet-driven selection process means that abstract impressions carry less weight than concrete records. Workers who document their accomplishments – particularly those tied to revenue impact or cost savings – provide ammunition for any manager trying to advocate for them. “She’s great” carries less weight than “she generated this much revenue” or “she saved the company this amount.” Zora kept a running document she called her “receipt file” – every project outcome, client compliment, and dollar figure she could attach to her work. When the layoffs came to her department, her manager had something to bring to the committee meeting. Not everyone had given their managers that ammunition. Some of them were better at their jobs than Zora. But she survived, and not all of them did.

Building relationships with decision-makers, not just peers, matters. The network advice often emphasizes horizontal connections – peers at other companies who might hire you someday. But layoff decisions get made by people with organizational power. Workers who maintain relationships with leaders several levels above them benefit when those leaders have influence over who stays and who goes. Developing capabilities that travel matters more than mastering company-specific systems. Workers who invest their learning time in broadly applicable skills rather than proprietary tools position themselves better for the market regardless of what happens at their current employer. This sometimes conflicts with what the current employer wants, which wants you to master the internal systems that only matter there. The tension is real, and workers need to navigate it consciously. Financial preparation changes the equation in ways that extend beyond the obvious. Workers with substantial emergency savings can afford to be selective in their next position rather than taking the first offer out of desperation. They can invest time in job search without financial panic. They maintain negotiating leverage. Six to twelve months of expenses, kept liquid, provides not just financial security but psychological security – and psychological security affects job search effectiveness. Warning signs deserve attention. Hiring freezes often precede layoffs. Unexpected return-to-office mandates sometimes aim to trigger voluntary departures. Major project cancellations signal shifting priorities. Quiet benefits eliminations suggest financial stress. None of these guarantees layoffs, but together they paint a picture. Workers who pay attention can begin their job search before the official announcement rather than after.

Deeper Problem

There’s a question beneath all this tactical advice that deserves acknowledgment. Should employment work this way? The current system asks workers to invest emotionally in their jobs – to show loyalty, to make sacrifices, to identify with their employers – while offering no reciprocal commitment. The employment relationship has become asymmetric. Workers are expected to behave as if their jobs are relationships while employers treat workers as resources. This creates a kind of structural bad faith at the heart of corporate employment. Some workers respond by withdrawing emotional investment. They show up, do adequate work, and save their passion for life outside the office. This protects them psychologically but creates the disengaged workforce that companies then complain about. Others invest fully despite the risks, hoping their particular employer will prove different. These workers face deeper devastation when layoffs come because they gave something real that wasn’t truly wanted. The advice to build career security rather than job security amounts to accepting this asymmetry as permanent. It’s pragmatic counsel for navigating a system that isn’t going to change. But accepting something as permanent for practical purposes isn’t the same as accepting it as just. Workers can develop portable skills and maintain broad networks while still recognizing that a system requiring such constant self-protection reflects something broken in how we organize work.

The workers who believe they couldn’t have prevented their layoffs are largely correct. The spreadsheet logic operates according to its own priorities. But the remaining workers can meaningfully affect their odds through strategic visibility, financial preparation, and skill development oriented toward market demand rather than employer-specific needs. What this doesn’t change is the fundamental insight: the layoff decision wasn’t about you. It was about numbers. The same company that celebrated your contributions last quarter calculated this quarter that your contributions cost more than they wanted to pay. This isn’t personal, though it’s also entirely personal when it’s your livelihood at stake. Career security has replaced job security as the meaningful unit of analysis. This is a loss disguised as advice. It means that stability – the ability to stay in one place, to build deep relationships with colleagues over decades, to master a particular domain without worrying about what the market wants next – is no longer available to most workers. What’s available instead is adaptability, and adaptability, however valuable, extracts its own costs. The spreadsheet doesn’t know your name. It knows your salary, your title, and your department. When the calculus says you go, you go. The only protection that remains is making sure you have somewhere else to land.

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