Mama said work hard. Meta, PayPal, and Coinbase just said hold our beer.
- May 20
- 9 min read
100,000 jobs gone in five months. The deal mama described is dead. Here is what is actually true now.
I am going to be direct with you today, because the moment calls for it.
Mama said work hard. Be loyal. Keep your head down. Do your job well. The company will take care of you.
Sweetie. Look at the news.
Meta is cutting 8,000 people next Tuesday. PayPal is eliminating 4,760 jobs. Coinbase is testing what it calls "one-person teams" where engineers, designers, and product managers are all the SAME human being. Cloudflare cut 20 percent of its workforce in a week. Upwork cut 24 percent. LinkedIn, the company whose entire business is helping people find jobs, is cutting its own people. Spirit Airlines collapsed entirely and put more than 13,000 employees on the street.
More than 100,000 tech jobs have been cut in 2026. We are not even halfway through May.
If you are still operating on mama's playbook, I love her, but she is going to get you hurt.
Today we are going to talk about what is actually happening, why it is happening, and what you need to be doing about it. And I want to warn you up front. This one is not gentle. The market is not gentle, and pretending it is would be a disservice. So we are going to keep it real.
The week in receipts
Let me walk you through what actually crossed the wire over the last two weeks, because the cumulative picture is the only honest summary.
Meta cuts 8,000 on Tuesday
Companywide layoffs begin May 20. About 10 percent of Meta's 78,865-person workforce will be gone, with more reductions coming in the second half of 2026. The company will also freeze 6,000 open roles it had previously planned to fill. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been telegraphing this since January, saying 2026 would be the year AI changes how Meta works.
Meta is profitable. Meta is not in trouble. Meta is choosing to shrink the human workforce to free up cash for AI infrastructure to the tune of $115 to $135 billion this year alone.
PayPal is eliminating 4,760 jobs
That is 20 percent of the company, gone over the next two to three years. New CEO Enrique Lores told investors PayPal is "becoming a technology company again" and "aggressively adopting AI in our development processes."
In plain English: replace humans with software, on the way to $1.5 billion in annual savings.
Coinbase cut 700 employees
That is 14 percent of staff. And CEO Brian Armstrong did not even try to soften it. He posted on X: "We are not just reducing headcount and cutting costs, we're fundamentally changing how we operate: rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it."
Read that again. Coinbase is rebuilding itself as an intelligence. The humans are now around the edge.
He also announced the new structure: "AI-Native pods" replacing traditional teams, "player-coaches" replacing "pure managers," and one-person teams where one human plays engineer, designer, and product manager simultaneously, directing AI agents to do the rest.
Three jobs. One paycheck. That is the model they are testing.
Cloudflare cut 1,100 jobs
About 20 percent of the workforce. The CEO and co-founder said internal AI usage was up more than 600 percent in three months and the company had to be "intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era."
Upwork cut 24 percent
About 150 jobs out of 600 employees. The CEO framed it as building "a more efficient operating model as the nature of work evolves."
The irony is not lost on anybody. Upwork's entire product is the labor market they appear to be displacing.
LinkedIn is laying off
About 5 percent of its 17,500-person workforce. Yes. LinkedIn. The product whose entire job is to help YOU find a job. They are cutting their own.
BILL cut up to 30 percent
The fintech company announced cuts of up to 30 percent of headcount, about 700 people.
Spirit Airlines is just gone
More than 13,000 employees lost their jobs in a single week when the airline shut down all operations after 34 years in business.
That is roughly two weeks of news. Not one quarter. Not one year. Two weeks.
The big picture nobody is connecting
Here is the part that should make every working professional pay attention.
Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta are collectively spending roughly $725 billion on capital projects in 2026. Almost all of it is going into AI infrastructure, GPUs, and data centers. That is up from $462 billion in 2025. The largest capital investment cycle in modern American business history is happening right now.
The money is going INTO AI.
The people are coming OUT the door.
At the same companies. At the same time.
This is not a recession. The companies cutting most aggressively are profitable. Several of them are reporting record quarters. They are not cutting because they have to. They are cutting because they have made a strategic decision that fewer humans plus more AI will generate better returns.
That is a structural shift. Not a downturn. The jobs being cut right now are not coming back when the economy recovers. They are not coming back at all.
A Resume.org survey of 1,000 U.S. hiring managers found 55 percent expect layoffs in 2026, and 44 percent name AI as the top driver of those cuts. Both numbers were a fraction of what they are now just two years ago.
The lie mama did not know she was telling
Mama's deal was real. In her time.
In her labor market, you did get pensions for staying. You did get internal promotions for tenure. You did get healthcare in retirement. You did get a gold watch. The deal made sense because the company was making money off your continued employment, and your continued employment was making money for the company. It was a real partnership.
Then a few things happened.
The pension got replaced with a 401(k). Portable. Yours when you leave. The company no longer had a financial incentive to keep you long-term.
Healthcare in retirement evaporated. The ACA filled the gap. The company no longer had a benefit you could not get elsewhere.
The internal promotion ladder broke. Companies started hiring external candidates for senior roles because they could pay them more without disrupting the internal pay band. Internal promotion bumps now average 3 to 5 percent. External moves average 10 to 20.
And then 2024 and 2025 happened, and AI got good enough at enough tasks that companies started believing they could run leaner.
The deal mama described did not die in May 2026. It died decades ago. May 2026 is just the month where it became impossible to ignore.
The thing nobody on the internet wants to say out loud
Here is the part where I am going to lose some of you. That is fine.
Yes, layoffs are devastating. Yes, the system is structural and unfair. Yes, you can be a brilliant, hard-working, dedicated employee and still get cut for reasons that have nothing to do with you.
ALL of that is true.
And.
The bar is going up. Whether we like it or not. And the people who survive this period are going to be the ones who accept that and adapt, not the ones who keep hoping the bar will go back down.
Working hard is not enough anymore. It used to be. It is not now.
You also have to be working CURRENT.
The skill set you had in 2019 is not the skill set that wins in 2026. The tools changed. The expectations changed. The pace changed. The amount you can produce in a week if you know how to use the modern toolkit is several times what you could produce in a week with 2019 tools. Companies have noticed. They are pricing accordingly.
If you are still doing your job the way you did it five years ago and you are not actively learning the new tools, you are not standing still. You are falling behind. Standing still in a moving market is not neutral. It is regression.
That is the part nobody on TikTok wants to tell you, because it does not get likes. People want to hear that they are fine, the system is broken, and they deserve better. The system IS broken. They DO deserve better. AND they still have to do the work of meeting the moment.
Both things can be true.
Loyalty does not save you. Updating yourself does.
Mama said be loyal and the company will be loyal back. The data on this is brutal. In the 2022 through 2025 layoff waves, long-tenured employees were frequently cut at slightly higher rates than newer hires, because they were more expensive to keep on the payroll.
Twenty-two years at a company is no longer a shield. Sometimes it is a target.
The people who survive layoff waves are not necessarily the most loyal. They are the most CURRENT. They are the ones who learned the new platform, took the certification, attended the conference, used the AI tool first, and made themselves harder to replace.
Loyalty is a value. It is a good one. I am a fan. But it is not a career strategy.
Working current is the career strategy. Loyalty is what you bring to the people you work with. Not the company logo on your LinkedIn.
What you should actually be doing right now
I do not do homework on the blog as a rule. Today I am making an exception, because the news is too hot for me to wave you off without something real to grab.
If you have a job right now, your job is to be sharpening RIGHT NOW.
That means knowing what your market rate is. Not what you THINK it is. What it actually is. Pull up Glassdoor, Levels.fyi, BLS, and LinkedIn salary tools. Run the numbers for your exact role in your exact metro. If you are below market by 10 percent or more, you are in a position where a layoff would be financially worse than it has to be. Negotiate up or look up.
That means having a current resume. Not a resume you would update if a layoff happened. A resume that is current TODAY. With your last 12 months of accomplishments on it. With outcome bullets, not duty bullets. With the keywords from the kind of role you would want to take next.
That means being on LinkedIn and being active. Not constantly. But visibly. Comment on industry posts. Share interesting articles with a thoughtful caption. Be findable. Recruiters source from LinkedIn. If you are invisible there, you are missing 60 percent of the opportunity pipeline.
That means having tried the AI tools that matter for your field. Not mastering them. Just trying them. ChatGPT. Claude. The specific tools for your industry. The hiring managers who are still going to be hiring in 2027 are looking for people who can talk about AI without freezing up. Be one of them.
That means having SAVINGS. Three to six months of expenses if you can possibly manage it. Financial runway is what gives you the option to walk away from a bad job, refuse a lowball offer, take a beat after a layoff, or bet on yourself. The people who get stuck in bad situations are usually the ones with no runway. Build runway.
If you do not have a job right now, your job is the same. Sharpen. Update. Be visible. Run the numbers. Test the tools. Network. The work is not different. The urgency is.
What mama actually got right
She was wrong about loyalty and the deal. She was right about some things, and I want to give her credit because I love her.
Mama said work hard. Still true. The work just has to be sharper, faster, and current.
Mama said be a person people can count on. Still true. Integrity, follow-through, kindness, professionalism. Always have mattered. Always will.
Mama said keep learning. Still true. She probably meant taking a class or reading a book. Today it means continuous skill-building. Same principle. Different mechanics.
Mama said do not burn bridges. Still true, and arguably MORE true now. Your network is your retirement plan in a market this volatile. The people you treat well today are the people who hire you in 2029.
Mama said save money. Cannot stress this one enough. Financial cushion gives you options. Options are everything in this market.
The values were right. The structure was wrong. Keep the values. Build new structure on top of them.
If you are reading this and you are scared
Good. A little fear is appropriate. It is information. Use it.
But do not let it paralyze you. The market is hard. It is not the end. It is a reshaping. The people who get through it are not the ones who panic and they are not the ones who pretend it is not happening. They are the ones who look at it clearly, accept what is real, and adapt.
You can be one of those people. Today. This week. Starting with one thing on the list above.
If you need help
I have spent almost twelve years in HR. I have built hiring processes. I have audited them. I have sat in the rooms where layoff decisions get made. And now, as a Career Coach, I work with people who are figuring out what comes next.
If you have been laid off recently, or if you are watching the news and worried that your industry is next, my free 30-minute Career Consults exist for exactly this kind of conversation. No upsell. No catch. Just an honest conversation with someone who knows what is actually happening on the other side of the desk.
If you were laid off from Spirit Airlines specifically, my offer from last week still stands. Put "Spirit" in the notes when you book and I will flag your session.
For the full conversation, The Career Bloom Podcast drops new episodes every Tuesday at 7 AM CT. Season 5 is Mama Said Season, and we are taking apart every piece of advice she ever gave you.
Mama meant well. The deal she described was real, in her time. The market changed and nobody told her.
We are the ones telling her now.
Your Brand. Your Career. Your Business. In Full Bloom.
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