Researcher discusses the ‘cruel optimism’ of tech industry layoffs

In 2022, after decades of booming growth, technology companies in the United States began to lay off droves of employees. The announcements—which continued in 2023 and 2024, spanning from major corporations to startups—made constant headlines: Meta dropped 11,000 employees, 13% of its staff. Microsoft cut 10,000, Amazon 27,000.

In all, between 2022 and 2024, more than 500,000 tech workers were laid off. Smaller cuts have continued; this week, Microsoft cut more than 6,800 globally, nearly 2,000 in Washington.

In 2023, University of Washington researchers recruited a group of 29 laid-off U.S. tech workers to explore the effects of these mass cuts on employees. Over five weeks, participants reflected on topics like job searching and the potential for workplace organizing. They shared their answers and responded to each other in a private Slack group. Overall, the group was ambivalent about tech work. They said the work was often unfulfilling, despite their plans to continue in the industry.

The researchers presented their paper April 30 at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2025) in Yokohama, Japan.

UW News spoke with lead author Samuel So, a UW doctoral student in human-centered design and engineering, about shifting views of the tech industry, the potential for workplace organizing and why workers find themselves in a state of “cruel optimism” with the industry.

Can you give some context around the layoffs? Why was it such a big shock that the tech industry was laying people off like this?

Overall, the layoffs came as a shock because the tech industry has been thought of as layoff-proof for the past 20 years. At least since the 2001 dot-com bubble crash, there hasn’t been precedent for mass tech industry layoffs. So many tech workers reckoned with the possibility for the first time, and many of the layoffs were unceremonious—people learned about the cuts when their access to work accounts was revoked, or through impersonal email announcements.

Companies generally cited macroeconomic factors when they announced layoffs. This included high interest rates, industry-wide revenue losses and over-hiring during the pandemic.

But what’s interesting is that these companies were announcing layoffs in rapid succession. Some appeared to be performing well, even achieving record profits, yet still staged subsequent rounds of layoffs. So it’s also helpful to understand that layoffs are helpful for boosting stock performance, and companies were simply copying each other because they could.

Mass layoffs may have previously been considered taboo in the tech industry, but now that big tech companies were doing it, it became more acceptable for other companies to follow suit. Some also speculated the layoffs were intended to reset labor relations in favor of employers, because tech workers were previously able to command high salaries.

I do want to note that, because the study didn’t engage with executives or company leadership, my understanding is primarily drawn from news articles, public speculation and the working theories of the participants in our study.

What made you want to study this?

I’m broadly interested in the values and beliefs surrounding technologies and in studying the rhetoric of tech companies. I also had a personal interest. In Seattle, we’re surrounded by the tech industry, and I was curious about how these mass layoffs would potentially impact not just the tech industry, but the cultures, neighborhoods, and cities that were largely developed by these tech companies.

I also went to a public STEM high school and majored in computer science in my undergraduate degree. I received a very clear message that, to many people, a tech job signified upward mobility, work-life balance and job stability. My high school was largely made up of low-income immigrant families, and tech jobs practically signified the American dream. So I was curious about how layoffs might have affected or shaped people’s beliefs around the tech industry and what that signals for the future of the industry.

What do you think distinguished these from layoffs in other industries?

The idea that the tech industry is layoff-proof was a factor. Another aspect is the rollout of high-profile generative artificial intelligence technologies. Some tech conglomerates were announcing billion-dollar investments in AI around the time of mass layoffs. This contributed to internal conflicts and alienation that many laid-off workers experienced, especially those who felt companies would chase technology trends at the expense of their workers’ well-being.

Several workers in the study felt this was a culmination of their disillusionment with major tech companies. In many ways this seems to track with how the broader culture has come to view these companies. What do you make of this shift in perception?

Some participants in our study likened the tech industry to a cult, that it has these cults of personalities and passion around leadership principles and company values that are almost treated as scripture. So some of the romantic or utopic sentiments around tech companies are now being actively challenged by tech workers. This is not particularly new—tech workers have been voicing their concerns and discontent over the past decade. We’ve seen the rise of collective organizing and worker-led campaigns. But I think the mass layoffs took this discontent to unprecedented levels.

Even so, most tech workers in our study planned on staying in the industry. This raises an interesting tension: What might it mean for the tech workforce to be disillusioned with the beliefs that drove the industry for so long? For example, some participants talked about entering the tech industry with goals of changing humanity or working on projects with broad societal impacts, to ultimately be disappointed when their work was just moving pixels around.

Your paper centers on the theory of ‘cruel optimism.’ Can you explain what that is and why it applies to these workers’ experiences?

Cruel optimism describes a relation in which something you desire is actually detrimental to your well-being. The cultural theorist Lauren Berlant coined this concept to describe how people might remain attached to ideas of the “good life” because it promises a desirable outcome. But the pursuit of this good life can lead people to work through precarious or uncertain conditions that put them at risk.

In our case, cruel optimism helps us understand why tech workers remain in an industry that is actively contributing to their unfulfillment and discontent. Berlant raises interesting points about how, when ideas of the good life are threatened, people will hold onto those ideas as much as possible, as it feels like a necessary way of being in the world. We can see this in how tech workers cling to certain ideas of what a good life looks like in the tech industry, even while they are explicitly criticizing the tech industry and its leadership.

What are some potential ways for the tech industry to move beyond its current state?

Mass layoffs are not inevitable. They weren’t common in the U.S. until the 1980s, and there are historical examples of tech workers successfully pushing back and contesting their layoff decisions from the early 2000s.

We found workers managed their feelings of discontent through individual adjustments. For example, some accepted that work is just work, and moving forward, they planned to act in their best interests and not in those of the company. While there is value in that shift, it also risks having workers isolate themselves in dealing with these problems or resigning themselves to the way things currently are.

Our paper argues that these feelings of discontent can be redirected toward collective action or organizing. The tech workers in our study had an appetite for resistance or organizing, but they felt powerless in pushing back. This makes sense, since the tech industry is largely anti-union by design. Founders of early tech companies said that unions were antithetical to innovation.

But fostering open spaces for collective reimagining of the industry can take many forms. Existing organizing groups like Tech Workers Coalition operate across different companies and physical locations. Some workers in our study were talking about these issues with other tech workers for the first time. Simply sharing grievances and expressing discontent with trusted coworkers is a form of organizing.

The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.