The Tech Layoff Number That Became My Pizza Job

TL;DR: Tech companies cut more than 260,000 workers in 2023, and by early July 2026 the running count was closing on 120,000. The count stops the day payroll does. Everything expensive happens after.

In March 2023 I was writing technical procedures and building slide decks for a Fortune 50 client, six figures, contract badge, data centers. By the end of that same month I was managing a pizza store for money that couldn’t cover the life the old salary had already built.

My résumé didn’t go illiterate in those four weeks. A company deleted a row on a spreadsheet, and the deletion kept eating long after it left the building.

In 2023 I wrote that 224,000 people in tech had been laid off, because that was the number available the day I drafted it. Layoffs.fyi closed the year at 262,735. Somewhere in that gap 38,735 more human beings had piled up while my sentence sat there being wrong.

Big numbers make good corporate disinfectant. At six digits nobody has to picture a kitchen table, and that is the whole fucking point of printing them that way.

I dragged this file back out because I was inside that rounding error. Nobody sent a press release for the 38,735, and nobody asked us what December looked like.

The layoff count left out rent, the car note, and 1,500 applications.

Rent didn’t stop. The car note kept its appointment every month like a collections agent with a calendar app, and the credit score went down the way a fever goes up, a few points at a time until the number quit looking like mine. Debt filled the difference, because that is what debt is for.

I sent out roughly 1,500 applications over that stretch, some matched to work I had done for a decade, some so far beneath it that hitting submit felt like kneeling, and the portals wrote back with polished little notes thanking me for my interest in the opportunity. A few of those beat me to closing the tab.

Then came the pizza store, five months of it, and later a factory floor moving appliance parts. The work was real and physical and necessary. The pay lived close enough to the poverty line to wave at it.

People like to turn a fall like that into an inspirational montage, because the alternative is admitting how thin the floor has gotten under everybody. I ain’t got a montage. I worked, I hurt, I worried, and I kept swinging at anything where the math came out even, which is eventually how I ended up writing for a living instead of applying for one.

Employers call the layoff a transition. Creditors keep using calendar months.

A six-figure salary builds obligations at six-figure speed. Housing, transportation, insurance, family costs, and every decision you made back when the money looked permanent keep billing the old version of you.

AI makes a cheap alibi.

By early July 2026, Layoffs.fyi had counted close to 120,000 tech workers cut on the year. Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported 52,050 announced technology cuts through March and said employers were shifting budgets toward artificial intelligence.

Some of those jobs are changing because software can do parts of them now. That part is real, and pretending otherwise would make me the kind of jackwagon who thinks the loom is coming back. The executive language wrapped around it is working a second job.

“AI transformation” is the softest goddamn phrase in the language for firing people. It makes a management decision sound like weather. The words disappear the humans who picked the budget, set the timetable, accepted the error rate, and decided which payroll lines would fund the bet.

Human beings used a machine, or the promise of one, to sell a choice they had already made. The language decides who eats it when the replacement works badly.

Treat AI as an unstoppable force and failed automation turns into the price of progress. Workers carry that cost up front, customers sit on hold with a synthetic voice that can’t solve the problem, no invoice ever reaches the conference room, and the people who approved the system are three slides into the next one before the first one finishes failing.

Experience only protects you while somebody is buying it.

I knew how to do my job. I had the salary, the title, and the work history to prove it. None of that put an obligation on the next company to look at the evidence.

Companies cut roles for reasons that have nothing to do with the competence of the person sitting in them. Budgets move, leadership changes, departments merge, vendors win contracts, and a fashionable tool makes last year’s staffing look embarrassing on a slide.

The hiring market has its own cruel geometry. A laid-off senior worker reads expensive for a comparable role and suspiciously overqualified for anything under it, time out of work makes recruiters twitchy, and survival work opens a second gap between the résumé and whatever story the hiring manager showed up expecting. So you apply wider.

The tracking systems reject faster than you can apply. Each rejection makes the next employer more careful, and a temporary corporate decision hardens into a private condition you carry around like a limp.

Calling that a skills gap insults everybody in the room. It’s horseshit, and it lets a hiring market off the hook for a design it chose on purpose.

A man doesn’t send out 1,500 applications because he forgot to hustle.

The pizza store paid worse and asked more.

Corporate work paid more and carried the status. The store and the factory asked more of my back, tolerated fewer private emergencies, and left less money at the end of the month to recover with.

There were people in those buildings holding whole operations together while customers looked through them like furniture. They knew inventory, scheduling, equipment, food safety, conflict, and the daily physics of pushing too much work through too few hands. The economy files that under low-skilled because the knowledge doesn’t arrive in a deck with a logo on the corner.

I had crossed the salary border in both directions, so I got to watch the fraud from both sides. Corporate America praises resilience in the job ad and screens out the people whose lives are built from it, and service work demands adaptability by the hour and pays like the skill came free with the apron.

The layoff taught me something uglier than that. A career can be real without ever being yours, because the company rents your expertise and hands back whatever is left of you when the numbers move. Anybody building on somebody else’s platform has signed the same lease.

I keep the number in my mouth for a reason. I’m checking the tracker again while I write this, watching the 2026 count roll over onto somebody else’s kitchen table, and I don’t know the name of the poor bastard it picked up while I typed that.

Sources

• Layoffs.fyi: Tech layoff tracker
• TechCrunch: The final tally for 2023 tech layoffs
• TechCrunch: Major 2026 tech layoffs where employers cited AI
• Challenger, Gray & Christmas: March 2026 job cuts report

Frequently asked questions

How many tech workers were laid off in 2023?

Layoffs.fyi recorded 262,735 tech workers laid off in 2023. Running totals published earlier in the year were lower, which is why the 224,000 figure I used at the time was already stale by December.

Are all 2026 tech layoffs caused by artificial intelligence?

No. Employers have cited AI in many announcements, and layoffs also come out of restructuring, cost cuts, mergers, slower growth, and earlier overhiring. AI can be a real operational change and convenient cover for a budget decision at the same time.

What happened after my tech layoff?

Debt, a credit score going the wrong direction, and survival work managing a pizza store and moving parts on a factory floor, with more job applications in between than I care to count.