Mike

This is what happens when you treat people like quarterly expense line items. Meta’s been cutting people every quarter or two since the efficiency push started. Each wave removes employees who built the systems, knew how things actually worked, and had the judgment to navigate complex problems. Now they’re hiring replacements who can’t explain basic concepts, submit obviously AI-generated work, and perform worse than the people they fired. The manager posting this had to tell grown adults they were losing their jobs, watched them panic about mortgages and visas and kids, saw them cry. Then leadership forced him to backfill those same roles with worse candidates. This is what layoffs actually cost. You’re not cutting fat. You’re amputating institutional memory, severing relationship networks, and destroying the judgment that only comes from years of context. The $150K salary savings in Q1 turns into 18 months of productivity loss, broken systems, and quality degradation. The people you let go knew which meetings actually mattered, which stakeholders to loop in, and how to get things shipped. The replacements are learning from scratch while your products decay and your best remaining people watch this dysfunction and start taking recruiter calls. Leadership celebrates the headcount reduction in earnings calls. Shareholders see the margin expansion. Nobody’s measuring the knowledge destruction, the morale collapse, or the compounding talent flight. By the time the board notices product quality tanking, the employees who could have fixed it are gone. And they took their networks, their context, and their trust with them. You can’t hire your way out of institutional knowledge you deliberately destroyed.