When Surviving Layoffs Means Losing Yourself

If you work in tech right now, this probably sounds familiar. Your company either just did this, or it's about to.

I've been through enough layoffs that I've lost count. Different companies. Multiple rounds at some of them. I've been laid off twice myself. This time I made it through. Somehow that doesn't make it easier.

The specific details change: which teams get cut, what percentage, whether it's "market conditions" or "strategic refocusing" or "right-sizing." But the patterns? Those stay remarkably consistent, whether you're the one who loses your job or the one who watches it happen to everyone around you.

So let's talk about what nobody talks about: what happens to the people who stay.

The Math That Doesn't Math

Here's a pattern I've seen across multiple layoffs: the work doesn't disappear when the people do.

Sometimes entire departments get cut (sales, support, services) while others stay intact. The executives call this "strategic" or "refocusing on core priorities." But the work those departments did doesn't vanish just because the headcount does.

Customer questions still come in. Sales deals still need technical input. Someone still has to figure out what all those people were doing. The departments that survive absorb the chaos in ways that don't show up on a spreadsheet. More escalations. More "quick questions" that aren't quick. More context switching because the person who used to handle that is gone.

Other times, the cuts slice across teams rather than eliminating them entirely. You inherit projects you didn't know existed. You discover the person who got laid off was the only one who knew how some critical system actually worked. You're doing archaeology on old tickets and Slack threads, piecing together institutional knowledge that just walked out the door.

Either way, the math doesn't work. Fewer people doesn't mean proportionally less work. It means the work metastasizes in unpredictable ways.

The Belonging Paradox

Here's what the research says: a sense of belonging helps people weather difficult times. When you feel connected to your team, when you trust the people around you, when you believe your contributions matter, you can handle higher demands and tougher challenges.

Here's what layoffs do: they obliterate belonging overnight.

How do you belong to a team that might not exist in six months? How do you invest in relationships when you've just watched colleagues get deleted? How do you show up authentically when you're performing the theater of "everything's fine" while internally screaming?

The team-building exercises feel surreal now. The "optional" happy hours where we pretend we're still a family. The Slack celebrations of shipping features while people's healthcare is ending. The cognitive dissonance is exhausting.

Belonging requires psychological safety. Psychological safety requires trust. And trust requires believing that the organization won't suddenly decide you're expendable.

We don't have that anymore.

Survivor's Guilt Takes Different Forms

"Why them and not me?"

The answer varies depending on how the cuts were made.

Sometimes it's department-based. Your role was deemed "essential" while theirs wasn't. You have to sit with the knowledge that the company decided building features matters more than helping customers use them. That engineering is critical while the people who sell, support, or implement what you build are expendable. You keep working while watching colleagues in other roles lose their jobs, and you're supposed to feel grateful about it.

Sometimes it's seemingly random within a team. Then you're left wondering: was it performance? Salary? Tenure? Politics? You can't know. Nobody tells you the criteria. So you fill in the gaps with worst-case scenarios. Every mistake feels like evidence you should have been on the list.

Sometimes it's clearly about budget and seniority, and you survive because you're cheaper. That doesn't feel like a win.

The common thread: you can't just be relieved you kept your job. Relief gets tangled up with guilt, discomfort, and the nagging sense that you're complicit in something you didn't choose.

If you already dealt with imposter syndrome, layoffs make it worse in unpredictable ways. Sometimes you feel validated (your role was essential!), sometimes you feel like you got lucky, sometimes you just feel like you're next.

The exhaustion isn't a personal failing. It's a rational response to impossible conditions.

The Agile Dark Side (Now With Extra Darkness)

Sprint planning when you don't know who'll be here for the retrospective.

Stand-ups where you're mentally counting who's left, wondering if you'll recognize when the next round starts.

Velocity metrics that ignore the fact that you're doing three people's jobs and attending twice as many meetings because someone has to represent the team that no longer exists.

Retrospectives where you're supposed to identify "what went well" when what went well is that you still have a job, and that feels too dark to say out loud.

The methodology assumes stability. It assumes psychological safety. It assumes you can fail fast and learn because failure is just data, not a reason to cut costs.

But when twenty percent of your colleagues just got cut, failure isn't just data anymore. It's existential.

What Nobody's Saying Out Loud

You're not okay. That's not a deficit. That's the appropriate response.

Your productivity is probably down. Your focus is probably shot. Your motivation is probably somewhere between "going through the motions" and "actively job searching." This isn't because you're weak or ungrateful or not a team player.

It's because you're grieving. You're grieving the colleagues who are gone. You're grieving the team culture that died with them. You're grieving the version of this job that felt sustainable.

You open Slack to ask someone a question and their name is grayed out. You go to tag them in a doc and they're not in the workspace anymore. Small losses that add up to something unbearable.

And you're trying to do it while pretending everything's normal because that's what's expected. But grief doesn't work on a sprint schedule.

The Trap

Here's what you're supposed to do when a job becomes unsustainable: leave. Update your resume. Start interviewing. Find somewhere better.

But here's the reality right now: there is nowhere better. The job market is flooded with people from other layoffs. Every tech company is either doing layoffs or about to. The ones that aren't cutting are on hiring freezes.

You see them on LinkedIn. Former colleagues. People with solid track records and good references. "Day 87 of my job search." "Still looking." "Open to opportunities." The posts start optimistic and get quieter as months turn into a year, then longer.

I know someone from a non-engineering role who couldn't find work for two years after a layoff. They burned through their 401k. Eventually they started looking at Buddhist temples that offer housing. Not as a spiritual calling. As a way to survive.

That's the risk you're weighing every time you think about speaking up or pushing back. That's what "just leave" actually means right now.

So you stay. Not because you want to, but because the alternative might mean burning through your retirement savings and hoping for free housing somewhere. Because you need the income. The healthcare. Because interviewing while employed is hard, and interviewing while traumatized is nearly impossible.

And staying means something different now than it did before.

The autonomy you used to have (choosing projects, advocating for changes, speaking up in meetings, pushing back on unrealistic timelines) all of that feels too risky now. Every decision gets filtered through a new question: will this make me expendable?

You stop volunteering for the experimental project. You stop pointing out when something doesn't make sense. You stop being honest in retrospectives. Not because you don't care, but because caring too much or not enough could both get you put on the next list.

The company didn't just take your colleagues. It took your ability to do your best work. Because doing your best work requires psychological safety, and psychological safety requires believing that honesty won't get you fired.

You can't afford to leave. But you also can't afford to stay, at least not in the way that made you good at this job in the first place.

That's the trap. And right now, thousands of people in tech are caught in it.

What This Means

Every layoff has its own story. Bad quarter. Shifting priorities. Overhiring in boom times. Leadership betting on the wrong strategy. Whatever the reason, the result is the same: people are gone, and the rest of us are left navigating an impossible situation.

I grew up watching my parents run the family mortgage brokerage. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, everything collapsed. They stopped taking paychecks. They had to let go of staff they'd worked with for years. I saw what those decisions cost them… the guilt, the stress, the impossible calculations. To this day my mom still hoards household supplies (toilet paper, laundry detergent, canned goods) buying in bulk whenever there's a sale. That financial insecurity never leaves you.

I understand that layoffs aren't always about bad leadership or corporate greed. Sometimes they're about a business that's bleeding out and trying to survive.

But understanding why it happens doesn't make the impact on workers any less real. The people my parents had to let go still lost their jobs. The trust still broke. And knowing the business might not survive didn't make it any easier for anyone involved.

Right now, tech isn't in a 2008-level crisis. Most of these companies aren't bleeding out. But they've adopted the same playbook, and the cost to workers is just as real, whether the layoffs are about survival or optimization.

And that's the difference. When layoffs are about survival, everyone suffers together. When they're about optimization, workers absorb the cost while the company protects its margins.

Your struggle isn't happening despite the system. It's happening because of it. The system depends on you having nowhere else to go. It depends on you needing this job enough to absorb the chaos, the guilt, the loss of autonomy, the constant low-grade terror of being next.

The question isn't "how do I cope better with this?"

The question is "how long can I stay in a place that showed me exactly how expendable I am, while also knowing I might not have another choice?"

I don't have an answer to that. Nobody does. That's why it's a trap.

The Real Crisis

The crisis isn't that you're struggling. The crisis is that struggling has become the price of staying employed.

We've normalized treating mass layoffs as routine business decisions. We've normalized expecting survivors to just keep going. We've normalized the gap between "essential" and "expendable" being drawn along arbitrary lines.

And we've normalized the idea that if you can't handle it, you should leave. As if leaving were actually an option right now.

The psychological toll is not a personal failure. It's evidence that you're human, working in a system designed to extract maximum productivity while providing minimum security.

If you're barely holding it together, that's not weakness. That's your nervous system correctly identifying that something is very wrong. The problem is that being right doesn't give you options.

So you stay. You keep showing up. You keep pretending. Because that's what the trap requires.

I used to love this work. I used to care about getting things right. Now I'm just trying to make it through the day without falling apart.

I'm tired. Tired of the fear. Tired of waiting for the next round. Tired of making every decision through the lens of "will this make me expendable."

If you're tired too, you're not alone.