Last month, while working on a client's project, I learned that a former teammate I knew from the industry had been laid off. This situation was different from the "team downsizing" or "cost optimization" explanations we've become accustomed to in the past few years; the company laid off hundreds of people simultaneously and opened far fewer new positions requiring different skill sets. This is a concrete example of a new layoff pattern we're increasingly seeing in the tech sector in 2026, calle...