Recently, some people I’ve worked alongside, and care about, lost their jobs. Since then I’ve been thinking about what I’d want to say to them, and to those of us who are still here.

First, where I’m standing. These are my own views, not my employer’s. I won’t go into what happened or argue about whether it was the right call. I’m also writing as someone who still has a job, and as a manager. I know that could colour how this piece reads, so take what’s useful and leave the rest.

Here’s where I’ve landed. Layoffs are now part of working in tech, in good years as well as bad. We can’t make that uncertainty go away. But we can prepare for it before it arrives, stop and recover when it does, choose our next step deliberately, and look after each other along the way.

The share price or valuation won’t tell you

In October, eBay said it would cut about 9 per cent of its workforce. Its shares were up almost 40 per cent for the year, and CEO Jamie Iannone’s memo to staff said: “Our strategy is working.” A week later, the company reported revenue up 14 per cent.

That isn’t a company in trouble, it’s a company changing direction (or more bluntly more of an attempt to optimise revenue and solidifying its cost base).

It wasn’t always like this. In January 2009, in the depths of the global financial crisis, Microsoft announced the first mass layoffs in its 34-year history, saying it was “not immune to the effects of the economy”. Layoffs were what you did when the sky was falling. In 2025, Microsoft cut more than 15,000 roles while Satya Nadella wrote that the company was thriving “by every objective measure”. He called it “the enigma of success”.

Somewhere between those two memos, layoffs stopped being only a crisis response and became a routine way to run a company. Layoffs.fyi has counted between 120,000 and 265,000 tech layoffs every year since 2022, and as I write this, 2026 has already passed the whole of 2025.

I’m not judging any particular decision, just describing the conditions we now work in. If you build software for a living, the chance of a layoff comes with the job, like on-call rosters and legacy code. It can happen when your company is struggling, and when it’s doing brilliantly.

Look up from the keyboard

This part needs care, so let me say plainly what I’m not saying. I’m not saying the people who lost their jobs weren’t prepared. Plenty of brilliant, well-prepared people are laid off. Preparation doesn’t stop a layoff. It shortens the fall.

Still, tunnel vision is a risk for almost all of us, managers included. Heads-down feels productive. You get very good at this codebase and this team. But the market doesn’t care how well you know your company’s internal tools, and it has shifted. Last year, for the first time since its list began in 2021, Jobs and Skills Australia stopped rating software engineers as in shortage in any state. In the US, Indeed has tech job postings sitting about a third below pre-pandemic levels. Demand is moving rather than vanishing: postings that mention AI are growing while the rest shrink.

So every so often, look up. Read the ads for the job you’d want next, not the one you have. Do a mock interview, just to take off the rust. Ask whether you are keeping up with AI development workflows and trends.

Most of all, invest in people. It sounds like soft advice, but there’s hard evidence behind it. In 2022, researchers from MIT, Stanford and LinkedIn published an experiment involving 20 million LinkedIn users. The connections that led to the most job moves weren’t people’s closest contacts but their moderately weak ties: the people they knew a little. The effect was strongest in digital industries such as software.

A network is the one thing you can’t build in a hurry. Write, speak, mentor, review a pull request on someone else’s project. If that feels like too much, start where you are, simply extend your connection at your current company: talk with peers and people outside of your team, be curious and genuine. People in tech move around, so today’s colleague may be at another company in a year or two. And keep a running list of your wins and achievements, because you’ll forget them by the time you update your resume.

So keep a quiet Plan B, even when everything looks fine: a few months of savings if you can manage it, and a rough idea of your entitlements (and your visa position, if that applies). That isn’t paranoia. It’s like a safety rail - we don’t put those because we want people to go over but rather to prevent. Considering joining your union if you think it will be useful.

If you lost your job: stop first

If you’ve just lost your job, you don’t have to decide anything today.

Shock, grief, anger and embarrassment are all normal. So is self-blame, even when the layoff had nothing to do with your performance. If a lot of who you are is wrapped up in what you do, as it is for many of us in tech, it hits harder. That isn’t weakness. A large review of studies found that unemployed people were about twice as likely as people in work to report psychological problems.

So stop. Give yourself time.

And use the care package, all of it: the Employee Assistance Program counselling, the placement service, any alumni directory/Slack, the career coaching. Some of it can feel like a box being ticked, and you may be sure you don’t need to talk to anyone. Book one session anyway. You can stop after that.

There’s a small study from 1994 that I keep coming back to. Psychologists worked with a group of laid-off professionals, mostly senior engineers. Some wrote about their feelings about losing their jobs, for 20 minutes a day over five days. Others wrote about neutral topics, or nothing. Eight months later, about half of those who’d written about their feelings were back in full-time work, compared with fewer than one in five of the rest. They hadn’t sent more applications. The researchers’ best explanation was that they walked into interviews carrying less anger about their last job. It’s one small study. But it matches something most of us know: things written down or said out loud weigh less than things carried around. Talk with your support network regularly to express your feelings.

When you’re ready, decide slowly. The government’s Moneysmart guide puts it well: “take some time to process the information, then … make a plan.” The market is slower than it was a few years ago, so plan for months rather than weeks, and try not to grab the first offer just to make the feeling stop.

Deciding slowly starts with knowing what you’ve been offered. Read the separation package properly: redundancy pay, notice or pay in lieu, unused annual and long service leave, any bonus or equity that pays out or lapses, how long benefits like health cover or the laptop continue, and the date by which you have to sign anything. If something was only said in a meeting, ask for it in writing. That isn’t being difficult, just clear.

In big companies the package is usually fixed. Still, there’s no harm in asking, politely, about the terms that matter most to you: an end date that lines up with a vesting date or a visa deadline, say, or an agreed reference. If something about the process feels unfair, you’re entitled to say so. A genuine redundancy isn’t an unfair dismissal, but if you believe yours wasn’t genuine, a claim has to reach the Fair Work Commission within 21 days of the dismissal taking effect. That deadline is strict, so get advice early.

Whatever you raise will land better as facts and dates than as hurt. This is where the writing helps: put the feelings on the page, so the conversation can be about the terms. And don’t do it alone. Ask your partner, or a friend who’s good with numbers or has been through a layoff, to be your support person. Go through the documents together, and if there are more meetings, ask whether they can come along. If you’re a union member, call your union. Helping members through this is a big part of their job.

None of this is legal advice, so a few official pages are worth reading early. The Fair Work Ombudsman sets out redundancy entitlements. The ATO publishes the tax-free limits on redundancy payments. And on a sponsored visa, such as a 482 or Skills in Demand visa, you generally have up to 180 days to find a new sponsor, so get proper migration advice now.

Then work out how long your savings will last. If the search runs longer than that, look at government support once your employment has ended. JobSeeker Payment from Services Australia is the place to start. Redundancy and leave payouts can mean an income maintenance period before payments begin, and savings can add a separate waiting period, so check early rather than when the money is running low. There’s no shame in using it.

If you stayed: feel it, then find your feet

There’s a group we rarely talk about after a layoff: the people who are still here.

You still have a job, so it can feel as if you’re not allowed to complain. But you lost people. The colleague who reviewed your code every day, designed the feature that you delivered or ran the numbers on your A/B experiment. The manager who backed you. The coworker who simply made the day better. You may feel sad, angry, anxious, guilty and resentful, sometimes all before lunch.

In his 1993 book Healing the Wounds, David Noer gave this a name: layoff survivor sickness. He described the anxiety, guilt and distrust that settle over those who stay, and how they stop taking risks. That last part is the one I’d watch most closely.

So feel it first. There’s no deadline, and nobody should be asking you to cheer up.

Most people do stay, and if the company is in reasonable shape and you still enjoy the work, that’s usually a sensible choice. What I’ve seen go wrong is quieter. You keep turning up, but part of you is still in the week of the layoff, bracing for the next one. Months can pass like that, and meanwhile the company is changing shape around you.

A restructure rarely just takes things away. It usually brings a new direction and gaps that someone has to fill: a problem that suddenly matters more, a new team, a decision that used to be made three levels up and now isn’t. Those are openings, and they tend to go to the people who ask about them.

So when you’re ready, and not before, ask. What are the new priorities? Where does my work fit? What could I own now that I couldn’t before? It’s a small risk, the kind Noer saw survivors stop taking. Joel Brockner and colleagues found that survivors who felt they had some control over their work held on to more of their commitment. You can’t control the decision, but you can often shape your role: the problems you take on, the people you work with, what the work means to you.

None of this means pretending you’re fine. If you’re resentful, say so to someone you trust. It’s often telling you something worth knowing, and carried quietly for too long it mostly hurts you, not the company. Staying should be a choice you’ve made, not one you’re putting up with. And if you take a clear look and decide it’s time to go, that’s a sound decision too.

One warning: a new opportunity is not the same as quietly absorbing the workloads of the colleagues who left. That’s a fast road to burnout. Agree and surface with your manager/leader on what stops, not just what continues.

Look after the people who left

This may be the part that matters most.

When Airbnb cut about a quarter of its staff in 2020, it set up an opt-in public directory of departing employees and invited those who stayed to help them find work. You don’t need a company program to do the same thing on a small scale.

Send a short note. “I’m thinking of you, and I’m glad I got to work with you” is plenty. Write a LinkedIn recommendation, make a warm introduction, offer a mock interview or a reference.

Then do the part most people forget. Check in again after a few weeks, and again after a few months. The first wave of support is loud, and it fades fast. The second message is often the one that matters.

Some things are better left unsaid: “maybe it’s for the best”, advice nobody asked for, anything that hints the layoff was about performance. Offer help without pushing it, and if someone goes quiet, don’t take it personally. They may just need space.

To those who left: give yourself time, take the help, and choose your next step on your own terms. To those who stayed: feel it, give yourself time to regroup, and don’t carry it alone.

We can’t make the uncertainty go away. We can only decide how we meet it, and whether we meet it alone.

These are my personal views and do not represent my employer.