In some ways, Wednesdays are the worst days for this kind of thing, and that’s when the email arrived. Not Monday, when at least you anticipated it, nor Friday, when you can vanish into the weekend. About 3,000 employees at Intuit were informed that their last day would be July 31 on a typical midweek morning in Mountain View. In the time it takes to read a memo, 17% of the workforce has left. The CEO of Intuit, Sasan Goodarzi, presented it in the typical manner. simplifying. making the structure simpler. establishing a quicker “builder culture.” That same evening, he…
Author: David Reyes
David Reyes
Experienced political and cultural analyst, David Reyes offers insightful commentary on current events in Britain. He worked in communications and media analysis for a number of years after receiving his degree in political science, where he became very interested in the relationship between public opinion, policy, and leadership.
The week following layoffs, there’s a certain silence in a tech office. People wear their headphones for a bit longer. Slack becomes silent. An engineer with an H-1B visa is working on a computation unrelated to code somewhere in that silence. 60 days. For thousands of Indian professionals working at Meta and Amazon, that is the number that counts now, and the math becomes suddenly personal. In its most recent round of layoffs, Meta eliminated about 8,000 positions as part of a larger reorganization centered on artificial intelligence. Amazon continued to make cuts across all divisions, following a trend that…
The headquarters is located on Santana Row in San Jose, an eight-story structure sandwiched between eateries and retail establishments—the kind of address that indicates a successful business. Additionally, NetApp appears to be doing well on paper. That’s the part that consistently surprises people. For the most recent quarter, the company reported revenue of about $1.71 billion, up about 4% year over year. The management reported record profitability and rapid growth. Then the layoffs resumed during the third week of May. Employees have begun to identify this rhythm aloud. One word that is frequently used on message boards and on Blind…
It is difficult to ignore the timing of the email, which arrived on a Wednesday. Greg Williams had stood under new lights five days prior, on May 15, at the Acrisure Amphitheater’s opening in downtown Grand Rapids, the company’s name glowing over a crowd. By May 20, the same man was informing about 2,250 of his employees that they would be leaving the company by the end of 2027. The space between those two moments—the celebration and the memo—has an almost cinematic quality, and it’s the kind of detail that stays with you longer than the numbers. The layoffs, which…
Last week, the letter was sent out quietly via email on a Friday afternoon when the campus had already begun to thin out for the season, just like these things usually do these days. The decision had already been made when Berea learned about it. Founded in 1845 in a town that used to refer to itself as the “grindstone capital of the world,” Baldwin Wallace University was cutting once more. Seven graduate programs, nine undergraduate majors, and nineteen minors. Ten faculty positions have been eliminated. As the conclusion of a “semester-long academic optimization process,” President Lee Fisher emphasized that…
This week’s news from Mooresville arrived quietly, as is typical in stock car racing. There was just a meeting room and a vice president named Matthew Lucas informing staff members that their jobs were being eliminated—no big press conference or farewell tour. In NASCAR’s second-tier O’Reilly Auto Parts Series, Ford-backed AM Racing had folded. Wondering what would happen next, dozens of people ventured out into a Carolina afternoon. In this sport, scenes like that have become unsettlingly common. The middle class in NASCAR seems to have been steadily declining for some time. At the end of the 2024 season, Stewart-Haas…
As is often the case, the news arrived on a Monday. In what the company referred to as a reorganization, twenty-four employees, or roughly ten percent of the workforce, left America’s Test Kitchen. The announcement carried an odd, déjà vu feeling for anyone who has been following the Boston-based food media outfit over the past few years. In three years, there have been two rounds of layoffs of almost the same size. ATK’s image, with its stainless steel counters and serious-looking cooks arguing over how to properly brown butter, has an almost theatrical quality. The program, which was filmed at…
This month, when you scroll through the financial pages, the first thing you notice is what’s missing. The Fed’s next move, Wall Street’s anxiety, and the ongoing drama surrounding tech earnings are all widely covered. However, Dubai? Abu Dhabi? Almost nobody outside the area is discussing the strange quiet that has descended upon the two cities that once seemed untouchable, almost arrogant in their stability. Early in March, the Capital Markets Authority closed trading on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange and the Dubai Financial Market, citing its “supervisory and regulatory role.” When regulators don’t want to state the obvious out…
On Wednesdays, which inexplicably always feel worse than Mondays, the email arrived in inboxes. By Thursday morning, LinkedIn was doing what it does best: transforming corporate reorganization into a silent procession of parting posts, blue “Open to Work” banners, and the odd sour joke. The Eden Prairie cybersecurity firm Arctic Wolf, which has been marketing itself as a pioneer in managed detection and response for the better part of ten years, recently laid off about 250 employees. As is typical in 2026, AI was the rationale. The business carefully framed it. A representative discussed ongoing investment in the Aurora Superintelligence…
The way large Canadian corporations now announce layoffs has an almost ritualistic quality. A brief statement in the late afternoon. An ambiguous statement about change. a reluctance to disclose numbers. Even though Canadian Tire’s July announcement was nearly exactly as written, the response in Toronto’s business circles felt different. heavier. quieter. Perhaps because everyone was aware that there would be more cuts. On July 29, the company announced that it had removed an undisclosed number of corporate positions, justifying the move as a modernization initiative. The statement said, almost defensively, that no store employees were impacted. This distinction is important…