Layoffs suck. Losing your job in this economy is terrible, and dealing with the aftermath’s low morale and high uncertainty is incredibly stressful. If you work in tech and haven’t gone through it, consider yourself lucky. In this post, I want to share my perspective as someone who survived recent layoffs, offer some thoughts on preparing mentally for this reality in today’s tech industry, and provide practical signs to watch for if you’re concerned about your own company’s stability.

Automattic recently laid off 16% of its staff, mostly engineers. I was lucky not to have been affected by it. And luck is such an important factor that we don’t like to admit because it makes the process feel random and outside of our control. We struggle to accept that our professional fate might depend on variables beyond our influence. The truth is that if your organization has been doing proper performance management, it is difficult to believe that you could make a clean-cut and remove 16% of low performers. Among the many factors considered, I’m sure subjectivity is at play, along with the fact that it’s usually a few executives and senior leaders having to make broad-brush decisions that would be impossible to make in a fair and timely manner.

This usual lack of clarity on the decision process can take us on a very counterproductive negativity spiral. So, if you were affected by the layoff and you’re still wondering why, try not to dwell too long on it. Chances are, you had bad luck. Sure, there might be cases where you didn’t understand the org expectations and had blind spots, so there is a lesson there to be learned. It could also be the case that AI indeed came to take your job. Who knows.

What’s more productive than dwelling on the past is preparing for the future. In the economic context we’re going through, I think it’s wise to be mentally prepared and understand your options if—or should I say when—you’re directly affected by a layoff.

Warning signs

Being prepared is not just about having a plan B ready. It’s also about having the awareness to predict the future, even if it’s by a few days or weeks. If your organization hasn’t done layoffs yet but you’re feeling stressed that it might be the case, there are some signs that might help you see it coming. You don’t need to be a genius; it just requires some level of awareness and motivation theory. Sometimes, just being in the mindset to increase your awareness might be enough to spot it:

• If you’re in a leadership position, you have access to conversations and channels that might give you some clues. Pay attention to what is being said and, more importantly, what is being omitted.
• If you have access to financial data, you should try to understand your company’s financial results and business goals well enough. It’s important to understand your company’s industry context.
• Lastly, pay attention to obvious decisions that are being delayed without a clear explanation. Executives and senior leadership might not want to commit resources to some initiatives that they know will have lower priority, but they also don’t want to cause unnecessary fuss and negatively affect morale by explaining that the reason is because a layoff is coming.

Moving Forward: The Reality of Tech Industry Layoffs

Despite our best efforts to predict it, it will feel slow at first and then all of a sudden. And it will be painful. Again, layoffs suck. It’s always messy and could have been dealt with in a better way, but it’s not personal; it’s just business. And I hate to sound corporatey, but I honestly think it was super stressful for the senior leadership to make the hard decisions and figure out how to reorganize teams and sort priorities. I hope in the future we find better ways to avoid layoffs and still have sustainable businesses, but for now, this is the reality we have to live in.