How do you think a group of people laid off from a company are going to speak about their former employer? More on reddit.com

Oof, and I’m sure we’ll see this for a lot in the crypto space during this bear market (Coinbase, CDC) and companies overall.

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Excellent post. I work in HR too and can confirm this is fully accurate. The one thing that always gets me though: the leadership that fucked up the company in the first place are always the ones that stay in roles. It’s infuriating. Have seen numerous times that they got pay rises after to reward “difficult decisions / improving financial runway etc etc” More on reddit.com

So this is a good opportunity for (hopefully) an educational comment around how these things work. I’m gonna preface it by saying that I’m sure many people here will read what they want and misinterpret this as some sort of comment saying things aren’t bad or whatever. They are, labor market softness has been a theme since the early summer. Nobody’s trying to dispute that. So when looking at the challenger report, and layoff announcements in general, it’s important to remember that these things are tracking announcements not job losses. There’s a huge distinction there. Layoffs largely come in two varieties: The first and most normal type of layoff is an announcement of intended cuts. It’ll be something like “we intend to cut 20,000 jobs”. The details there are typically that some portion will be actual layoffs, some will be attrition over time, and some will be re-assignment within the company. So (strictly hypothetical) a layoff announcement of 20k people in October might only mean 2k people lose their job in October. The it might mean another 8k people lose their job by October of 2026. And maybe the other 10k positions are just natural attrition that isn’t backfilled. The second is straight harsh layoffs. That means when you see an announcement that 20k people are losing their jobs, 20k people lose their jobs within a few days. Those are super rare, typically only seen during extreme economic events (covid, like deep in to the GFC, etc). We’re not seeing a lot of that right now. But both of those show up in the challenger report the same way. So it’s important to remember that “1.1MM layoffs” does not translate to “1.1MM people were laid off this year”. Again, that’s not to try and sugar coat anything, obviously this sort of uptick in layoff activity is a further sign of a weakening labor market. It’s not good under any definition. But I’m a big proponent of accuracy for accuracy’s sake, and there’s a whole lot of rampant misconception in this community of what a layoff announcement actually means in the real world. More on reddit.com