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- 💯 Don't panic about the layoffs
💯 Don't panic about the layoffs
What's going on with the AI layoffs and what to do about it.
Max Haining
May 24, 2026
So quick recap of how Mark Zuckerberg's year is going.
Last January, in a company meeting, he told his employees "everything I say leaks. And it sucks, right?" That audio leaked. His security chief then sent a memo around threatening to fire whoever leaks. That memo also leaked, obviously.
Fast forward to last month. Different meeting, same Zuck. He told the room that Meta's AI learns from watching "really smart people" do things, and that they were the smart people in question. He added that it was "not strategically in your interest" to share that part openly.
You can probably guess what happened next.
The audio dropped publicly on May 19th. The next day Meta started sending out layoff notices to 8,000 of those really smart people. Which is kind of wild coming from a guy whose entire business model is built on knowing exactly what the rest of us say to our friends.
Just two weeks ago, it was about Coinbase and Cloudflare. This week, it was also Intuit (the company behind TurboTax and QuickBooks) that cut another 3,000. ClickUp that cut 22% of its staff. And in the same week, the governor of California signed a first-of-its-kind executive order to prepare workers for AI workforce disruption.
So if you're sitting there thinking what the hell do I even do with all of this, keep reading till the end for some practical tips.
Window into the Future
The thing I really can't stop thinking about isn't the cuts though. It's that the two stories about them landed in completely opposite directions, and both of them got passed around like crazy.
Intuit's CEO Sasan Goodarzi went on CNBC and said that "None of it had to do with AI. Everything was about how we become more effective." He framed the 3,000 cuts as cutting management layers, closing some offices, simplifying the org. Now, whether you fully buy that is another thing. Intuit also announced multi-year partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic the same day. But the choice to not reach for AI as the public reason, when reaching for it is basically free this year, is one of the more interesting things any CEO has done in 2026.
ClickUp's Zeb Evans went the other way. Like, the complete other way. He laid off 22% of his company by way of a 2,000-word manifesto on X about something he calls the 100x org, with million-dollar salary bands for people who "create outsized impact using AI", plus a line about how "most companies are delusional" if they think they can keep iterating on what they already have. Cuts and manifesto in the same tweet, on the same morning Meta was sending out its 8,000 notices. By the next day, it was already a meme.
And honestly, if you kept scrolling, the same split was showing up everywhere. Elena Verna, a growth advisor working with a bunch of scale-ups, wrote a piece this week saying most people in tech won't have the same job by the end of 2027. Dan Shipper, who runs Every, wrote pretty much the opposite from inside his own company. They've automated everything they possibly can and somehow grown from 4 humans to 30.
Which brings me to the practical bit. There's been a lot of advice flying around your feed this week about what to actually do with all this. I want to walk you through the three takes I think are worth your time.
1. Claire Vo, three-time CPTO, currently building ChatPRD. Dropped a tactical playbook right after Coinbase that picked up a lot of reactions. Her advice if you find yourself laid off: download Codex and Claude Code, build a dozen skills, ship them to GitHub, throw together a portfolio site with an agent per skill, post the link, then start messaging the founders of every "AI for [your job]" startup you can find.
2. Lenny Rachitsky, who many of you probably already read, came at it from a totally different angle in his most recent State of the Product Job Market piece. His take basically: ignore the headlines for a second and look at the actual hiring data, because the data tells you a different story. PM openings are at their highest level in over three years. The companies adopting AI properly aren't shrinking. They’re going out and hiring more people, especially ones with what he calls AI fluency. So basically the panic is louder than the data. Go figure out where the hiring actually is before you spiral.
I keep getting asked some version of “what really moves the needle for teams?“ all the time, which is part of why I'm running a free session this Thursday as part of L&D x AI week. Sharing field notes from a year of running enablement programs across 15+ orgs. Whether you're trying to lead this work inside a team, early in your AI learning journey or well into it, would genuinely love to have you there.
3. Holly Lee, who spent years as a global recruiting leader at Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft and now coaches careers, made a point earlier this year that I think holds up best this week. "Layoffs shock people's self-esteem. But you've got to be innovative and open-minded. Because when the market picks up, and someone wants to hire you, they'll ask: 'What did you do during that time?' You can't say, 'I've been applying for thousands of jobs.'" So what Holly is suggesting is to make whatever gap you've got visibly count for something.
Someone trying to hire you in six months wants to see what you did with this moment. And honestly, the same thing applies if you haven't been cut, which is most of us reading this. The people I see getting ahead are the ones who've had AI on their laptop every single day for a while, doing real work alongside them, well before any of this week's news hit their inbox.
There's actual data on what that looks like, by the way. Asana's CMO Shannon Duffy shared this research her team did with Anthropic. The jump from weekly to daily is bigger than the one from never to weekly. Most of what makes someone genuinely AI-native isn't which model they're using or which course they took. It's whether the tool is in their hands every single day, on the work they were already going to do anyway.
Join a 5-day Build Sprint 🛠️
If you've been meaning to actually build something, this is your sign. Harold and Ash are running a five-day vibe coding sprint (May 27–31) made for non-technical people, the whole point being that you can ship a working app without writing code.
There are live workshops along the way too, then a demo day to show what you made. Sign up here to join The Vibe Coding Games.
Alongside the sprint, the team will also host live workshops full of practical tips, AI workflows, and live demos.
🗓️ 27 May | Kickoff: Build Sprint Starts
🗓️ 29 May | Workshops
🗓️ 1 June | Build Sprint Deadline
🗓️ 9 June | Final Demo Day
How to AI 🤖
Every week, this section is your shortcut. Here are a couple of ways you could try AI this week that are worth your time:
Before you go ✌️
Which of the three takes lands for you this week, Claire's, Lenny's, or Holly's? Hit reply, I read every one.
See you next Sunday!
P.S. Want to make your team & company AI-first? Let us help here.
