It Hit Home This Week

Two weeks ago I wrote about Jack Dorsey firing 4,000 people at Block and the market throwing a party. That felt distant enough to have an opinion about. Dorsey's in San Francisco. Block's a payments company. You could read about it, feel something, and go back to your day.

Then Atlassian did it too. And that one landed differently.

Atlassian is Australian. Founded in Sydney by two blokes who built it from nothing into one of the biggest software companies on the planet. Last Wednesday they cut 1,600 people. Ten percent of their workforce, gone in a day. More than 900 of those were in research and development. The people who actually build the product.

480 of them were in Australia.

Mike Cannon-Brookes, to his credit, didn't dress it up the way Dorsey did. He said it wasn't easy. He said it weighed on him. He left the company Slack open six extra hours so people could say goodbye to each other. That's a small thing, but it's a human thing, and I noticed it.

That sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Read it again. It's not "AI replaced these people." It's "AI changed what we need." Which is somehow worse, because it's harder to argue with. It's not a machine taking your job. It's your job quietly becoming something the company no longer values enough to pay for.

Meanwhile, Reuters reported last Friday that Meta is planning cuts that could hit 20% of the company. That's potentially 15,000 people. The reason? AI costs are mounting and they need to "offset" them. The humans are the offset.

The Pattern Nobody Wants to Name

Here's what I keep seeing, and I think it's worth saying plainly.

The first wave of AI layoffs were about replacement. "The AI can do what you do." That's the Dorsey model. Brutal but at least honest.

The second wave, which is happening right now, is about reorganisation. "We're restructuring around AI." The jobs aren't being replaced by a machine. They're being dissolved into a new org chart that was designed with fewer humans in mind from the start. You didn't lose your job to a robot. Your job just stopped existing.

That's harder to fight. You can't upskill your way out of a role that's been deleted from the company's future plans.

And the third wave, the one I think is coming, will be about pressure. Companies that haven't laid anyone off will start to feel like they're falling behind. Their investors will ask why their headcount hasn't dropped. Their board will point to Atlassian's stock price (which jumped after the announcement, obviously). The layoffs won't happen because AI made the work disappear. They'll happen because not laying people off will start to look like bad management.

That's the part that keeps me up at night.

What I'm Telling My Team

I run a seven-person agency. Nobody's getting cut. But I'd be lying if I said the conversations aren't changing.

What I keep coming back to is this: the value of a person on my team isn't measured by their output per hour. It's measured by the things they do that I couldn't get from a tool at any price. Reading a client's tone in a meeting. Knowing when a project is about to go sideways before anyone says anything. Making a creative choice that's surprising in a way no probability model would produce.

Those things don't show up on a spreadsheet. And that's exactly why they're at risk. When companies reorganise around efficiency, the first things to go are the ones you can't easily measure. Which are, not coincidentally, the most human things.

Close enough. Again. That phrase keeps coming back.

The Atlassian Detail That Got Me

The union representing Atlassian workers said employees were told on Thursday and given until March 19 to "consult." Final termination on April 2. Two weeks.

These are people who helped build one of Australia's most successful tech companies. Some of them have been there for years. And they got two weeks of "consultation" that everyone knows is just the clock running down.

I keep thinking about Cannon-Brookes saying "thank you for everything you have contributed to our epic story." That word, "epic." Atlassian loves it. It's their word for everything. Epic this, epic that.

Funny how quickly you go from being part of the epic story to being a footnote in the restructure announcement.

What I'd Say If You're Worried

If you're reading this and wondering whether your job is next, I don't have a comforting answer. I genuinely don't know. Anyone who tells you they do is selling something.

But here's what I believe: the people who will be hardest to cut are the ones whose contribution is hardest to explain on a slide deck. The ones who make the work better in ways that don't fit neatly into a metric. The ones who bring taste, judgment, instinct, relationships, and cultural awareness that no model has.

That's not a guarantee. Companies make stupid decisions all the time. But it's the best bet I know.

Invest in the parts of yourself that are hardest to automate. Not the skills. The sensibilities. The things that make you, specifically you, irreplaceable in a room.

Because the rooms are getting smaller. And the people deciding who stays are looking at spreadsheets.

*Until next week,* Sammyd—der to ignore.Two weeks ago I wrote about Jack Dorsey firing 4,000 people at Block and the market throwing a party. That felt distant enough to have an opinion ”der to ignore.Two weeks ago I wrote about Jack Dorsey firing 4,000 peopl”der to ignore.Two weeks ago I wrote about Jack Dorsey firing 4,000 people at Block and the market throwing a party. That felt distant enough to have an opinion ”der to ignore.Two weeks ago I wrote about Jack Dorsey firing 4,000 people at Block and the market throwing a party. That felt distant enough to have an opinion about. Dorsey's in San Francisco. Block's a payments company. You could read about it, feel something, and go back to your day.