The Coming Layoffs and the Revenge of the Measurers

Summary

It's May 2026 and the layoffs aren't coming. They're here. Meta cut 8,000 this month, roughly 10% of the company, and redirected 7,000 to AI teams. Cloudflare cut 1,100, the first mass layoff in its 16-year history. Tech layoffs have passed 100,000 for the year. The four hyperscalers are planning $725B in AI capex in 2026, up 77% year-over-year. The "they just overhired during COVID and are self correcting" line was the dominant counter-argument presented by your favorite VC influencers . They've quietly stopped saying that now. There's no escaping the reality now. AI is going to wipe out a huge chunk of white-collar jobs. Blue-collar ones will also follow once robotics is solved. The Last of Us Peter Drucker once said: "Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two—and only two—basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Applying this broadly to most firms today you can divide this up into: The producers and marketers (PMs/Sales). The people who generate the ideas, the products, the research, the science and then go sell it. The leadership (CEO/VPs). The executives who set strategy, allocate capital, and hold political capital inside the firm. Who decide what gets built and who builds it. Even if a lot of them are not strictly needed they have the relationships with the top brass to hold on for a little while longer. That's it. The rest are fucked. Cloudflare's CEO Matthew Prince was direct about this in his Wall Street Journal op-ed. The vast majority of those laid off, he wrote, were "measurers": middle management, finance, legal, internal auditing, revenue recognition. The Two types of Complexity To understand why the middle gets cut, you have to understand where complexity in a firm comes from. There are two sources. Product complexity. If you're Gmail serving billions of users, that is a genuinely hard engineering, technical, political, and social proble...