Anne Morris

I also want to acknowledge that as we record this, there are whole public sector organizations and organizations that rely on government funding that are confronting large-scale layoffs and disruption right now as the Trump administration works to reshape government.

For those of you listening out there who are impacted and looking for work, we're thinking about you and the people who depend on you.

We hope you'll listen to our episode from last season on job seekers and find something there that is helpful to you.

The headline on our advice is to not do this alone.

Your real enemy right now is isolation.

So build a community to help you get through this difficult time.

You're going to get to the other side, we promise.

And Frances, in a future episode, we hope to give unsolicited advice to the architects of these decisions.

Surprising to no one, our point of view is that move fast and break things is not the right approach here.

Does that mean we're going to give Elon advice?

Yeah, we'd love to give Elon some advice and his boss and the Republican Party, because this is not just about one or two men at the top, which is how this story is being told.

We gave advice to the Democratic Party last year, and it only seems fair to include our Republican friends as well.

I like it.

In the meantime, today, we're going to talk to the people left holding the bag at any organization that's experiencing layoffs.

We want to answer the question, where do you go from here?

Let's get into it.

All right, Francis, to put this conversation in context, if we look at tech as an illustrative example here, what seems to be happening is that after a spike in layoffs in the last few years, some companies are continuing to shed workers in 2025 and rethink exactly who they're going to need to compete in an AI world.

As we record this, Meta just laid off about 5% of its workforce.

Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce, Google, they've all announced job cuts while still hiring for more specialized roles in AI and machine learning.

I think a fair way to characterize the general mood is that even as the economic news is relatively good, at least here in the U.S., disruption and uncertainty in the business environment are still driving a fair amount of caution.