The Quiet Signs Your Company Is About to Do Layoffs
The earlier you prepare, the better you land.
Hey, Prasad here 👋 I’m the voice behind the weekly newsletter “Big Tech Careers.”
In this week’s article, I share the early warning signs that layoffs are coming and the steps you can take before the announcement lands.
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A friend of mine at a large tech company told me something recently that stuck with me.
“Looking back,” he said, “the signs were everywhere. Three months before the announcement, I could see them clearly. But I convinced myself it wouldn’t happen to my team.”
It did happen to his team. And because he started searching only after the news broke, he was competing against hundreds of colleagues who received the same email on the same morning. It took him five months to land his next role and he took a lower base salary than he had before, just to end the uncertainty.
I think about that conversation a lot when I look at where we are right now.
As of June 11, 2026, there have been 247 layoff events this year impacting 183,966 workers — averaging 1,136 job losses per day. That’s double the daily rate of all of 2025. Microsoft, Oracle, Intel, Salesforce, Meta — the names keep coming. And the pattern isn’t random. It’s structural. AI efficiency gains are compressing headcount, and that pressure isn’t going away.
So this week I want to talk about how to read the room before the announcement comes. Not to scare you. Not to make you paranoid. But because the single most powerful thing you can do for your career right now is stop being reactive and start being proactive.
Why Most People Miss the Signs
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: we are wired to miss these signals.
When you’re inside a company, you see things that would be obvious to an outside observer but your brain has a vested interest in explaining them away. You’ve built your life around this job. Your identity, your income, your visa status, your team relationships. Of course you don’t want to believe it.
This is what psychologists call optimism bias, the tendency to believe that bad things are more likely to happen to others than to ourselves. It’s not stupidity. It’s human nature. But in the context of a tech career in 2026, it is expensive.
The other reason people miss the signs is simpler: they don’t know what to look for. So let me tell you.
The Quiet Signs to Watch For
These are ordered roughly from earliest to latest signal. The earlier you catch them, the more options you have.
1. A hiring freeze is announced in all-hands
This is usually framed as “being thoughtful about headcount” or “prioritising quality over quantity.” It sounds prudent. It often means the finance team has told leadership to stop spending.
Hiring freezes don’t always precede layoffs but layoffs almost always start with a hiring freeze. If you haven’t seen one yet at your company, note when it arrives.
2. Stack ranking exercises appear out of nowhere
If your company suddenly introduces or significantly tightens its performance review process outside of the normal cycle, pay attention. Stack ranking is often the mechanism used to build a list before a reduction. The framing is always about “raising the bar.” Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s preparation.
3. Skip-level meetings get rebranded as “calibration sessions”
When your skip-level starts meeting with your peers without you, and those conversations are described as “calibration,” it usually means leaders are assessing the team.
4. Your manager is added to an extra layer of org chart
Consolidation above you almost always precedes consolidation below. When a new layer of management appears between your manager and their VP, it often means the organisation is restructuring and your team’s scope may shrink as a result.
5. A new PIP cohort opens up
PIPs (Performance Improvement Plans) are sometimes genuine development tools. But a sudden uptick in PIPs across a team or org is often a managed exit strategy — a way to reduce headcount with documentation. If you hear peers talking about being placed on PIPs, take note.
6. Leadership language shifts
Listen carefully to the words used in all-hands, town halls, and company-wide emails. When “growth” and “investment” get quietly replaced by “efficiency,” “doing more with less,” and “AI productivity gains,” that is not coincidence. It is a preview.
If you spot two or more of these signals at the same time, don’t wait. Start moving.
Work with me | 1:1 Coaching
Three of my clients whom I am currently coaching are well-settled in their jobs but have spotted these early signs at their companies. They didn’t wait for the announcement, they started preparing now, while they still have leverage.
If you’re seeing these signs at your company and want a clear plan of action, feel free to reach out. Let’s have a free 15-minute discovery call to see if we’re a good fit to work together.
📩 Email me at info@bigtechcareers.com
Why Timing Changes Everything
Let me come back to my friend’s story and specifically the part about the lower salary.
According to Zety’s 2025 Post-Layoff Recovery Report, 59% of laid-off workers said facing lower salaries was their top challenge in finding a new job. And that makes complete sense when you understand the negotiation dynamics.
When you search while still employed, you negotiate from strength. You have a salary, you have stability, and you can walk away from any offer that doesn’t meet your floor. The company knows that. They price their offer accordingly.
When you search after a layoff, you negotiate from urgency. Every week that passes costs you money and, if you’re on a visa, costs you legal status. You feel the pressure, and it shows in the conversations. Companies know that too.
This isn’t a knock on anyone who’s been laid off and had to accept something less than ideal to end the uncertainty — that’s a rational decision in a hard situation. But if you can avoid being in that situation by acting earlier, you should.
The same Zety report found that 53% of laid-off workers submitted more than 50 applications before landing a role, and 1 in 5 submitted over 100. Over 30% were unemployed for more than 90 days.
That is the cost of searching after the fact. The goal is to avoid that position entirely.
How to Soft-Search Without Burning Bridges
This is the part most articles skip. They tell you to “update your resume and start networking” without acknowledging the real constraint: you can’t let your employer know you’re looking.
Here’s how to do it properly.
Turn off LinkedIn activity broadcasts before you update anything. Go to Settings → Visibility → Share profile updates. Turn it off. Otherwise, your entire network, including your manager, gets notified the moment you update your title or add a skill.
Reach out to your network under the guise of genuine curiosity. Not: “Hey, I’m quietly exploring opportunities.” Instead: “I saw you moved to Google’s infrastructure team, how’s that been? I’d love to hear what the culture is like there.” Build the conversation first. The opportunity discussion comes naturally from there, or not at all — and that’s fine too. You’re warming the network, not activating a transaction.
Target conversations, not applications. At this stage, you are not mass-applying. You are having 3–5 quality conversations a week with people at companies you’d genuinely consider joining. These conversations give you market intelligence, warm introductions, and when the time comes a very different starting point than a cold application.
Use your personal device and personal email exclusively. This should go without saying, but it bears saying: don’t use your work laptop, work email, or any work tools to conduct your search. Not even for “quick” things.
Don’t tell colleagues. Even people you trust completely. This is not about distrust, it’s about protecting them from an awkward position and protecting yourself from a conversation that reaches the wrong person.
What to Do Inside the Company in Parallel
Soft-searching outside doesn’t mean disengaging inside. In fact, the opposite.
Get visible on high-impact work right now. If layoffs do come and you’re being evaluated, you want to be the person leadership thinks of as essential — not the person who’s been heads-down on a quiet project for six months. Raise your hand for visible work. Take on cross-functional projects. Make sure the right people know what you’re delivering.
Document your impact. Don’t assume your manager is tracking everything you’ve shipped. Write it down. Keep a running log of outcomes, metrics, and decisions you’ve influenced. This serves two purposes: it protects you in a stack-ranking exercise, and it gives you the raw material for an excellent resume and interview stories if you do end up searching.
Build relationships outside your immediate team. Your direct team relationships are valuable. But in a layoff, decisions are often made at the org level — not the team level. Knowing people in adjacent orgs, in leadership, and in other business units creates options that wouldn’t otherwise exist, including internal transfers before separation.
Know your severance policy before you need it. Read your employment agreement and your company’s HR policies. Know what the severance formula is, what the vesting cliff is for your next equity grant, and what the timeline looks like if notice is given. This is basic information that most people only look up when it’s too late to act on it.
The Bottom Line
Layoffs in 2026 are not random bad luck. They follow patterns, and those patterns leave footprints.
The people who land well, in equal or better roles, at equal or better compensation, are almost always the ones who started moving before the announcement, not after.
Start paying attention now. The signs are there if you’re willing to look.
Have you spotted any of these signals at your company recently? Reply and tell me what you’re seeing. I read every response.
When you’re ready, here’s how I can help:
1:1 long-term career coaching to fast-track your career growth and land new opportunities
Behavioral Interview preparation course for MAANG+ companies
Mock interviews for your upcoming interviews
For more details, send an email to info@bigtechcareers.com
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The early-read instinct is right. The role-level signal underneath the org-level ones you list: 2026 layoffs are not random across a team, they track the breadth versus depth line. The roles cut first are legible enough that three colleagues or a model can absorb them. Naukri JobSpeak has AI-ML hiring for 13-to-16-year engineers up 32% in May 2026 while generic roles barely moved, so the same quarter is a layoff or a bidding war depending which side you sit on. Real preparation is not an earlier job search, it is becoming the person nobody can quietly reassign before the list is drawn. What sign have you watched predict who specifically gets cut, not just that cuts are coming?
Zia. itszia.ai. On LinkedIn too, tag me when career-decision threads come up.