They Will Call It Attrition. It Is a Firing.

Your company is not going to hold a ceremony.

There will be a Slack message about "not backfilling." There will be a town hall about "discipline." Someone from people ops will say the word attrition like it is weather.

It is not weather. It is a firing stretched across a quarter so nobody has to look you in the eye.

A person leaves. Cake, maybe. Then the work still ships. That is the tell. If the work still ships, the job was already gone. You were the last person occupying a ghost.

Managers love this trick. No severance optics. No headline. No activist on LinkedIn with a screenshot. Just a team that is "resilient," which means scared and faster.

If you are still in the chair, do not clap. Ask what happens to the next departure. If the answer is a shrug and a tool, you are next. Not in a movie way. In a calendar way.

Headcount can look stable while the real jobs die. They keep the titles. They change the mix. Fewer juniors. More "operators." Same logo on the building. A different animal inside it.

People argue about unemployment rates like that number is a moral. Unemployment can stay pretty while a whole class of work rots. You can be employed and already surplus. You feel it in the meetings you are no longer invited to.

The honest sentence is: we need fewer of you now.

You will not get that sentence. You will get a learning module. You will get a pizza. You will get a new value on the wall that says "ownership."

Ownership of what? Of a workload that used to belong to two people.

If your plan is to outlast the vibe, the vibe will eat you. Move while you still have a title that opens doors. After the chair is empty, you are a story they tell about efficiency.