They Laid Off the Guy Who Did Nothing — And the One Who Did Everything

When the article link landed in the ex-colleagues Slack channel, I was standing at the break-room coffee machine, waiting for an Americano that the machine had no business calling an Americano. The headline read: “Companies only ever lay off the people who actually do the work.” Underneath, the usual row of emoji reactions had already piled up: crying faces, fist bumps, the nodding-head agreement gif.

I swiped the notification away and didn’t reply.

It wasn’t that the article was wrong. It was just that, in over a decade in software engineering, not a single reorganisation I’d lived through had matched that conclusion.

I remember the first round of cuts I ever saw. Rumours churned through the office for three days. The list wouldn’t settle. Dave from R&D Team 3 didn’t say much those three days. He spent the afternoons crouched in the server room, a cable tie clamped between his teeth, the blinking switch lights reflecting off his glasses. His Jira queue was stacked to the top of the screen, and he was still testing that payment-callback interface, the one that gave everyone else a migraine after a single glance. Someone ducked in to whisper the latest rumour, and he didn’t even look up. When the list finally came out, his name wasn’t on it, not even once. The person who was let go was the R&D deputy director who oversaw him, a guy who managed three engineers, spent ten minutes of the weekly stand-up reading out everyone’s progress from a shared spreadsheet, and then, leaning back in his Aeron chair, asked, “Any blockers?” as if the question itself was the deliverable.

I was in the room when the VP closed the conference-room door. The latch clicked with a soft, final sound. He picked up a marker and drew three circles on the whiteboard. Inside them he wrote: Client delivery. Platform stability. New hire onboarding. He stared at the board for a moment, the marker still uncapped in his hand. Then he picked up the eraser, wiped one of the circles clean, and without turning around said, “If this role disappeared tomorrow, could we still get through the next release?” The eraser left a faint white smudge that hung on the board for the rest of the meeting, like the ghost of the headcount nobody wanted to name.

He never asked who was doing the work. He only looked at which circle he could erase and still keep things from falling apart.

I changed companies later, and I went through it again. The person who left that time was Margaret, the operations director. Margaret was good, genuinely good. Her handover document ran to five pages, printed out and neatly stapled, the font small but tidy, every item annotated with a file path to the relevant Google Doc or Confluence page. But nowhere on those pages did it say “Only Margaret can handle this.” Five pages that told you one thing: someone else, with that document in hand, could do all of it too.

She hadn’t made a single mistake. She had simply refined every process she touched until it was bulletproof and legible to anyone (the weekly metrics reports, the vendor contacts, the incident-escalation templates), until her absence left no friction at all. And in doing so, she had made herself the easiest person to replace.

Of course, I’ve seen senior engineers get laid off too. The day the entire international-streaming team was scrapped, two principal architects appeared on the list together. We went for farewell drinks at a dive bar downtown, the kind of place where the tables are sticky and the lighting is low enough to hide what you’re feeling. One of the architects slid his ID badge under the glass tabletop, right next to a half-empty pint glass, clinked his glass with the colleague next to him, and said, “This one has nothing to do with replaceability. We’re a sinking ship. Nobody got picked off.”

He said it completely calmly, because he could tell the difference. When a ship goes down, it doesn’t matter who knows how to swim.

Later on, I started managing people myself, and I began doing annual review presentations. One year, on the final slide, I deleted the words “Key Contributions” and put a single line in their place. I typed the line, then stared at it for a full minute, the cursor blinking at the end of the sentence. Just one line:

The following modules cannot be taken over within one week by any current team member if I am absent.

I wrote no conclusion. But after that year, I was never afraid of the list again.