From the inside looking out — here’s what it really felt like.
I didn’t cry when I got the email.
I just stared at it. Long enough that my coffee went cold, long enough that Slack disconnected in the background.
I had a morning stand-up in 6 minutes. I still logged in.
The subject line was cold. The language even colder.
There was no room for the “you did great work” speech, no handshake, no human.
After three years of solving impossible bugs, mentoring interns, working late on launches nobody outside engineering noticed…
I was gone.
Just like that.
I Knew This Day Might Come
But it still hit like a truck.
We’d heard whispers. “Reorg.” “Restructure.” “Efficiency.”
But I thought I was safe.
Everyone thinks they’re safe—until they’re not.
I didn’t have a low performance score.
I didn’t miss deadlines.
I wasn’t coasting.
And yet, none of that mattered.
Because when tech giants cut, they don’t just trim fat—they gut whole teams. Quietly. Strategically.
Like we’re just lines of deprecated code.
It Wasn’t Just a Job. It Was Identity.
You don’t realize how much of yourself you tie into work until it’s taken from you.
I was a woman in tech—something I worked my ass off to become.
I earned my seat at that table. I silenced every imposter thought. I stood my ground in meetings where I was the only one not wearing sneakers or speaking in acronyms.
But here’s the truth they won’t say:
You can be brilliant. And still be disposable.
Not because you weren’t valuable—
But because someone, somewhere, decided your headcount was “excess.”
They Called It “Strategic.”
We called it what it was:
A bloodbath.
We saw teams vanish overnight.
People locked out of email before they even read the memo.
Colleagues who just finished code reviews the day before—now erased from the org chart.
The worst part?
Nobody talks about what it does to those left behind.
The survivor’s guilt. The fear. The Slack messages that stop mid-conversation because their account no longer exists.
The Nightmare Isn’t the Layoff.
It’s what it reveals.
That stability in tech is an illusion.
That we’ve replaced loyalty with metrics, community with KPIs.
That the companies we helped scale now treat us like artifacts of a previous version.
You want to believe if you do everything right, you’ll be safe.
That talent matters. That impact matters.
But in rooms where decisions are made, your face is often just a number on a spreadsheet.
So Where Do We Go From Here?
I’m not writing this for sympathy.
I’m writing it because someone, somewhere, just got the same email.
Maybe she’s still sitting in shock. Maybe she’s blaming herself.
To her, I say this:
It’s not your fault.
You didn’t fail.
The system did.
And to the ones still inside the machine:
Look around.
Because the nightmare?
It’s real.
And it’s coming for people just like you.
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