A recent Entrepreneur headline proclaimed: “Dell Shrunk Its Workforce By 10% for the Third Year in a Row — Without Layoffs.”
Dell has about 97,000 employees. That’s according to its latest federal filing, published this week. In February 2023, it had 133,000. That’s a reduction of nearly 30% of its workforce in three years.
Except... Dell did lay off 12,500 employees in August 2024. That was less than two years ago. Someone on the editorial team at Entrepreneur failed at the most basic task of “accurate information.” (The article itself notes the layoff, which is a direct contradiction to the headline.)
On top of the layoff, Dell has employed other methods of reducing its workforce, such as hiring freezes, “employee reorganizations,” and a five-day return-to-office mandate. The end result is the same: reducing the size of the workforce. They’re layoffs without negative publicity.
I wrote about Dell in March 2024, when the company announced that remote employees would be ineligible for promotion. At the time, Dell’s own internal data showed the policy disproportionately impacted women. I said then that it looked like Dell was trying to force employees to quit rather than go through another expensive round of layoffs. When employees quit due to a change in working conditions, the company can shrug and say, “Not our fault that they quit.” Two years later, the numbers confirm exactly what I predicted would happen.
What Dell and other companies are doing is part of a broader shift toward what Glassdoor calls “forever layoffs“: continuous, small-scale workforce reductions that fly under the radar. But they create lasting damage to the people left behind.
The playbook for disappearing workers
In these “forever layoff” scenarios, the work doesn’t disappear. It gets redistributed to the people left behind.
The high-profile layoffs grab attention: Block cut 40% of its workforce in February 2026, with Jack Dorsey explicitly pointing to AI. Meta is reportedly planning to cut 20% of its staff. Atlassian cut 10%. But plenty of companies are taking the same approach as Dell and handling a reduction in force (RIF) much more quietly, to avoid attention.
But the cumulative effect is the same. And the impact on the people who stay is significant. Glassdoor’s research from September 2025 found that after a layoff, employee sentiment among remaining workers takes more than two years to recover. Repeated layoffs have double the impact on sentiment, with the biggest drops among key talent, managers, and new hires. Employee mentions of “layoffs” and “job insecurity” in Glassdoor reviews are now higher than they were in March 2020, at the onset of the pandemic.
The near-constant layoffs-that-aren’t-layoffs are demoralizing in a very specific way. Workers never know when the next “reorg” will eliminate a few people in their department. They absorb more work without more pay. They watch colleagues deactivated in Slack in real-time. Rolling layoffs breed cultures of anxiety, insecurity, and resentment.
“Just use AI” isn’t a workforce strategy
The CEO mantra of “just use AI” as a solution to a smaller workforce doesn’t sit well with the people actually doing the work. AI doesn’t replace a whole human, and certainly makes the remaining workers further wonder if their jobs will be next on the chopping block.
Zuckerberg said in January that he was seeing “projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person.” That framing — one talented person replacing an entire team — is becoming the justification for cutting headcount across the industry. Though Meta’s plans to cut headcount are in part to offset the $135 billion in infrastructure costs of AI (which is wild, considering how bad Meta is at AI compared to the frontier models). You’d think Meta could spare some of that investment for its human employees.
But how much of Zuckerberg’s claims of employees’ use of AI are actually happening on the ground? Technology reporter Kevin Roose wondered this on the Hard Fork podcast: “The data that we have is largely self-reports. And I think some firms have exaggerated how much they are doing with AI because they want to appear to be cutting edge and futuristic, and look how transformed we are.”
Even if it is the case that humans are now overseeing multiple AI agents, as Zuckerberg suggests, researchers have found that “AI brain fry“ is on the rise. This is defined as a type of cognitive strain and mental fatigue related to the excessive use of, interaction with, or oversight of AI — beyond one’s cognitive abilities. “Doing the work” alongside human colleagues is a far different experience than overseeing a bunch of AI agents.
At the other end of the spectrum, with employees less comfortable with AI experimentation on their own experience a fundamental training gap. Companies are telling workers to “just use AI,” but they’re not investing in teaching them how. If companies aren’t even providing the basics of AI training, expecting workers to use it as a substitute for human colleagues is setting them up for failure. Especially as many employees now report that AI usage is a part of their performance reviews.
It’s no wonder that employees are resentful.
Why the narrative isn’t fooling anyone
Dell, Block, Meta, and others like to claim that AI is so capable that companies genuinely need fewer people. In reality, these companies have decided that workers are the most expendable line item — and are using the current AI hype cycle as cover. When Jack Dorsey announced Block’s layoffs, its stock price jumped more than 20%. When reports of Meta’s potential layoffs surfaced, Meta’s stock climbed too. The market is rewarding companies for cutting people.
So they’re optimizing for short-term gains and framing it as “strategy.” Nobody seems to be asking what happens when the remaining workers burn out, suffer from “AI brain fry,” or when institutional knowledge walks out the door.
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