Between 2022 and 2024, the tech industry laid off somewhere around half a million people. Not contractors. Not underperformers. Engineers, designers, product managers, entire teams deleted in a single afternoon.
People who had been told they were essential, who had stock options vesting, who had relocated their families for these jobs. Gone. Often via email. Sometimes while locked out of their laptops mid-sentence.
The industry has moved on. Hiring is picking up. The job market is recovering. But something broke during those years that is not coming back, and I think we are only starting to understand what it was.
The loyalty contract is dead
There used to be an unspoken deal in tech. The company took care of you and you took care of the company. Not in a naive way. Everyone knew it was transactional. But there was an assumption of good faith. If you did good work, you had job security. If the company was profitable, your job was safe.
The layoffs shattered this completely. Companies with record profits laid people off. Companies that had just finished hiring sprees laid those same people off months later. The message was clear: your employment is a line item, and line items get cut when someone decides the stock price needs a bump.
You cannot rebuild that trust. The people who lived through 2023 remember. They watched colleagues get walked out. They saw the Slack channels go quiet.
They know now that loyalty flows one direction. The company will never be loyal to you, so being loyal to the company is just leaving money and security on the table.
Institutional knowledge walked out the door
When you lay off 10% of your workforce in a single day, you are not surgically removing underperformers. You are taking a chainsaw to the organisation and hoping the important bits survive. Often they do not.
The person who knew why that system was built that way? Gone. The engineer who understood the legacy codebase nobody else wanted to touch? Gone. The designer who had ten years of context about customer behaviour? Gone. The manager who had relationships across the company and could actually get things done? Gone.
This knowledge does not come back. You cannot rehire it. The new people you bring in start from zero. They do not know the history. They do not know where the bodies are buried.
They make the same mistakes that were already made five years ago because nobody is left to warn them.
I have talked to people at companies that did mass layoffs. The ones who survived describe organisations that forgot how they work.
Processes that nobody understands anymore. Systems that nobody knows how to maintain. Decisions that get relitigated because the people who made them originally are gone and the reasoning was never documented.
The people who left are not coming back
Here is the thing about traumatic layoffs. The people who get cut do not just sit around waiting to be rehired. They move on. They start businesses. They change industries. They take jobs at smaller companies that feel more stable. They go into consulting. They retire early.
They do literally anything other than go back to the company that discarded them.
And the people who survived? Many of them left too. Survivor’s guilt is real. Watching your team get decimated while you keep your job is not a relief. It is a nightmare.
The increased workload, the constant fear of the next round, the knowledge that you are only still there by luck. Plenty of people quit after surviving layoffs because staying felt worse than leaving.
The talent pipeline is damaged. Senior engineers who would have mentored the next generation are gone or disengaged. The institutional knowledge that used to transfer through osmosis has evaporated. The people who remain are doing more work with less support and burning out faster.
Nobody believes the mission anymore
Tech companies loved talking about mission. We are changing the world. We are connecting humanity. We are democratising access to information. The mission was supposed to be why you worked harder than you had to, why you took the lower salary for the equity, why you cared about something bigger than yourself.
The layoffs killed the mission talk. Hard to believe you are on a world-changing journey together when the company just fired twenty thousand of your fellow travellers to make the quarterly numbers look better. Hard to feel like family when family members get deleted by algorithm.
Now everyone knows it is just a job. Which is fine. Jobs are fine. But companies built their cultures on the assumption that employees would go above and beyond for the mission. That assumption no longer holds.
People show up, do their work, and leave. They do not stay late. They do not sacrifice weekends. They do not bleed for a company that has demonstrated it will not bleed for them.
This is healthy, probably. But it is a different relationship than what existed before, and companies have not adjusted. They still expect mission-driven behaviour while offering nothing in return except a salary that could disappear any Thursday.
The contract going forward
The new deal is more honest. I still love building software. I still care deeply about the quality of my work and the success of my team. That has not changed. What has changed is the expectation that caring about my craft means sacrificing my wellbeing for a company that has shown it will not reciprocate.
I keep my skills sharp because I am genuinely passionate about this industry. I maintain my network because relationships matter, not just as an escape hatch. I still go above and beyond when I believe in what I am building. The difference is that I do it with clear eyes now. I know the deal.
The old arrangement asked for emotional investment in exchange for an illusion of security. That illusion is gone. What remains is something more sustainable: doing excellent work because you take pride in it, not because you expect the company to love you back.
What comes next is probably better for workers. Clear boundaries. Realistic expectations. No more pretending that your employer is your family.
But something is lost too. The energy of building something together. The willingness to push through hard times because you believed in what you were making. The trust that your contributions mattered beyond the next earnings call.
The layoffs took that. I do not think it is coming back. And I am not sure the companies that killed it even understand what they lost.