You didn’t get laid off because your work was bad.
You got laid off because someone decided $20/month could approximate your output well enough to justify the math.
The meeting was 11 minutes. Calendar invite, no agenda. After a decade of results — a severance packet and a cardboard box.
45,000+ tech workers have been cut in 2026 alone. The math is simple: AI tools at $20/month are replacing salaries at $200k/year. The human in the equation is optional.
Here’s what nobody says out loud: the loyalty contract was always one-sided.
You gave them a decade. They gave you a salary contingent on a spreadsheet someone runs every quarter.
The real trap isn’t the layoff. It’s assuming the next job fixes this.
It doesn’t. The next job is the same conditional arrangement. Different logo. Same clause buried in the fine print: your value is only as good as our quarterly forecast.
You have real skills. Hard-earned domain expertise. The specific, irreplaceable knowledge that made you valuable to someone else’s P&L.
The question isn’t whether you’re employable.
The question is: why have you been applying those skills to someone else’s bottom line when you could start building your own?
That’s exactly what we work through in the LaunchThisWeekend workshop. LaunchThisWeekend.com
