Last updated: Wednesday, July 16th, 2025
Picture this: a seasoned engineer who’s built systems for two decades is shown the door to make room for someone half the cost.
The investors cheer.
HR smooths it over.
And the rest of the team? Quiet. Shocked. Working late. Silently updating résumés, taking sick days to sneak off to interviews, trying to untangle their own software just enough to escape what’s now clearly a nightmare job.
I know I might be late writing on the topic, but these thoughts have been boiling for years - while I watched and felt this shit-show unfold firsthand.
So here’s the disclaimer: this piece reflects personal opinion and observation. It may not be entirely fair, or factually correct. I’m too busy figuring out life in the age of remote-is-good-if-it’s-cheap and AI-can-do-that to track down every data point or interview every stakeholder.
But what I’ve seen?
Is good people replaced for no good reason.
Just a stack of bullshit excuses dressed up as strategic realignment.
A Trend That’s Anything but Temporary
Between 2021 and 2025, mass layoffs rocked the tech world. Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Google - all slashed tens of thousands of jobs. And they set the tone, with CEOs of other companies following like lemmings.
Sources like layoffs.fyi document over 650,000 layoffs in tech globally between 2022-2025. And that's only the companies that reported them. And a disproportionate number of those cuts? Most likely senior, well-paid staff in higher-cost regions; think the U.S., Western Europe, Australia.
Why? Because investors demanded “efficiency,” and “efficiency” in modern corporate lingo means cutting payroll.
But here’s what they don’t say in press releases:
You can’t lay off institutional memory.
You can’t outsource decades of context.
You can’t spreadsheet your way around human wisdom.
Oh, I'm sure they did "performance reviews". But I know for a fact that sometimes the term "performance" can simply mean "having great soft-skills" while not having knowledge and understanding of the actual domain at hand.
Price-Only Competition
Cost-cutting always looks clean on a balance sheet. Until customers leave. Until bugs pile up. Until product velocity slows to a crawl. Until someone asks, “Why did we ever let Sam go? They would’ve caught that.”
Choosing price-based competition over quality-based strategy might work for mass-produced goods (depending on how you define "might work" - a story for another time). But in software, systems, or anything requiring nuanced decisions and continuity, it’s a trap. Because:
Junior hires, while enthusiastic, lack context.
Offshore teams, however skilled, lack access or operate within different cultural parameters.
Documentation? Usually not enough. Most docs are an afterthought - ignored for years by the powers-that-be, missing entirely or dumped into Confluence, hoping they’ll be a Hail Mary when things go sideways.
The loss of “invisible work” compounds over time.
Companies that prioritize low cost over accumulated knowledge aren’t saving money; they’re deferring damage.
The Human Fallout
The layoffs don’t just affect those who are gone.
They demoralize those who remain.
Those who stay? Not grateful; gutted. Coworkers cut without hesitation, while the rest of the team’s left blindsided, because the real decisions happen behind closed doors.
They start asking:
Why do all the cool people leave?!
and immediately after:
What am I still doing here?
And many of them quit.
Not out of panic, but because the illusion is shattered: they’re now doing the work of two, for the appreciation of none, and they know damn well they’re just as disposable.
They choose smaller companies. Local firms. Bootstrapped startups. Teams that still treat humans like humans.
They transfer their know-how to newer players who are more agile, more ethical, and more aligned with the future of work.
It’s a quiet rebellion, but it’s real.
And it’s reshaping the industry from the edges inward.
A Lower Bar Means Everyone Loses
When price-only becomes the game, quality becomes collateral damage.
That affects:
Customer support (suddenly less helpful)
Product reliability (more breakage)
Release cycles & Roadmaps (fudged)
Onboarding (slower, harder)
Long-term brand trust (vanishing)
It may reset the bar for what customers expect. They tolerate worse. They learn to accept mediocrity.
And the people still standing? Stressed, overextended, burned out, juggling gaps while pretending it's fine.
And in the end, the entire market suffers.
Nobody builds legendary products in a race to the bottom.
Remote Work Was Never the Problem; Just the Excuse
I’ve been a vocal advocate for remote work, not as a “perk,” but as a life-altering benefit.
For neurodivergent folks. For caregivers. For introverts. For anyone who thinks best when they’re not under fluorescent lights next to a sales team on speakerphone.
It wasn’t for everyone, and it still isn’t.
Which is why it should be optional, but fully supported when chosen.
For those who thrived this way, remote work offered the kind of flexibility that made them better at their jobs and better at being human.
But the corporate world? It resisted.
Hard.
We were told remote work wasn’t productive.
That collaboration only happened in open-plan offices.
That people “weren’t working” if managers couldn’t physically watch them click.
Or worse. We were told we were somehow “wrong” or “defective” for enjoying our work in solitude.
Until, of course, remote work became their survival tactic during the pandemic.
Suddenly, it was no longer an obstacle or nuisance. It was a strategy.
Not to empower employees.
But to offshore, de-localize, and de-personalize the workforce.
What was once a fight for dignity became just another lever to drive salaries down, in some cases paying remote contracts less than in-office ones.
And in some companies, it got darker:
Remote work became the perfect excuse to expect people to always be available.
To answer Slack pings at midnight.
To squeeze extra hours without asking.
To extract unpaid overtime under the guise of flexibility.
The same flexibility that helped people build a life worth living was now re-framed as a way to cut corners and squeeze margins.
It’s not the technology that changed. Zoom, Teams, Slack were already here. It’s the intent.
Remote work wasn’t a threat or an impossibility.
It was, at best, a challenge to re-envision work without productivity loss, and with far better life management for the employee.
And many of us - advocates, early adopters, optimists - pushed hard for it.
We proved it could work.
We showed up. We delivered.
And in doing so, we handed corporations the perfect template to squeeze us even harder.
They took something empowering… and perverted it yet further into a cost-cutting tool.
We’re Not Pawns And This Isn’t Chess
Replacing humans like interchangeable pieces is an illusion of control.
But real companies aren’t board games. They’re complex living and breathing messes. Full of contradictions, dependencies and memory.
When you rip out the veterans and plug in cheaper parts, you may run for a while. But don’t be surprised when systems start cracking. Or when the smartest people stop returning your recruiter’s emails.
Some Hard Questions for Corporations
Are you trying to win by cost alone, or by value?
Do you measure success by headcount cost, or by customer loyalty, innovation, and employee engagement?
What happens when the people you cast aside start building your replacement?
- You offshored to Eastern Europe. Then to Latin America. Then Southeast Asia. What happens when those wages rise too? You betting on AI agents and robots to clean up after you?
The companies that thrive in the next decade will have conscience, and deliver quality with care.
The End Isn’t Near. It’s Already Here.
This isn’t a call to stop global hiring.
Plenty of regions of the world have incredible talent, but terrible economies.
The infusion of paid salaries would only help elevate these regions into better economic conditions.
It is also not a call to keep people around forever.
It’s a plea to stop treating experience like overhead.
To remember that cheap is not the same as smart.
To stop applauding investors who make billions while gutting the very teams that made the product work.
We have a choice in how we build companies.
And in how we leave them behind.
Don’t let short-term savings destroy long-term value.
Don’t let executive cowardice and investor greed dictate what excellence looks like.
People remember how you treat them.
And if you’re not careful, they’ll treat you the same.
But you, big corps and institutions, have already embraced the despicable path.
And you’ve become experts at walking it.
Royalties for the Fired
Let’s talk about the part no one challenges, but everyone knows is broken.
Companies retain full rights to the products and platforms their laid-off employees helped create, sometimes long after those people are gone.
They continue to generate profit from that work, year after year.
Meanwhile, the same employees walk away bound by NDAs, non-competes, and IP clauses so one-sided they might as well be engraved in stone.
Severance? Sure. Legal guardrails? Sometimes.
But the core setup? Still extractive.
They keep the upside.
Workers inherit the silence.
If there’s justice left in the system (and I'm not an optimist), it should include royalties: retroactive, taxed, and expensive. Paid not by the company, but the shareholders. Let the cost of exploitation finally hit the balance sheet.
Hexes and High Rates
I don’t just foresee it. I hope for it.
That the discarded build lean, sharp, unshakable consultancies.
That they charge a premium to clean up the mess their old companies left behind.
And that they laugh their way through the onboarding call.
You cut them loose.
They built something better.
Now you’re paying them to fix what you broke.
Or they’re taking your customers away.
Checkmate.