The cold hard truth about tech layoffs

Have we made our employers our lifeline, a saint that protects us from any pain?

Last Friday, Google announced it would cut 12,000 employees. This is undoubtedly very sad. But what I found on my LinkedIn feed was even sadder.

There, on the world’s business professional social media platform, I found a barrage of posts by workers cut from their jobs. All very emotional, all manifestos to their panic and the utter incomprehensible-ness of it all.

People wrote how they were “shocked”,

“absolutely heartbroken”,

devastated, terrified, never saw this coming.

LinkedIn Post from an Ex-Googler, part 1

another one

They wrote that all their hopes and dreams laid at Google. How it had meant everything to them. How Google singlehandedly “changed their lives”. They wrote how they’d spent every waking moment of the last 12 years devoting their life to that company. And I have no doubt that they did.