Your Role Is Safe. For Now.

Nothing was wrong. And then people started leaving.

Minitek is not a real company.
It is a composite. A stand-in. A name we use because patterns are easier to see when no one feels personally accused.

If you’ve worked in tech, you’ve probably worked somewhere like it. Just over three hundred people. Well funded. Calm on the surface. The kind of organisation that talks a lot about resilience and focus and being intentional about growth, usually in that order. The kind that sincerely believes it is doing the right thing.

When the restructure happened, leadership described it as surgical. Three roles removed. Targeted. Necessary. Done. A sign of discipline, apparently. Evidence that someone, somewhere, was making the hard calls so everyone else didn’t have to worry.

The announcement came in an all-hands meeting on a Tuesday morning. The slides were clean. The language was careful. People were told the hard part was over. That the business was stable again. That this wasn’t the start of something worse.

Then the sentence everyone had been waiting for landed.

Your role is safe.

There was a visible release in the room. Shoulders dropped. A few people smiled. Someone laughed a little too loudly, then caught themselves. Relief moved through the space in that very specific way it does when the bad thing you were bracing for doesn’t happen to you. Not today. Not this time.

Everyone settled back into their seats, comforted by the idea that whatever had just happened was now safely behind them.

From where I was sitting, it landed differently. Not as reassurance. More like inevitability.

“Your role is safe” doesn’t sound the same to everyone. For some people, it sounds like a starting gun. This round is over. The next one will come. And now there is time. Time to tidy up a CV. Time to answer the recruiter message you ignored last month. Time to leave cleanly, before safety becomes a sentence someone else delivers.

The weeks that followed looked, on paper, like a return to normal.

Calendars refilled. Stand-ups resumed. Someone booked a workshop about momentum. The word focus made a brief but enthusiastic comeback. If you weren’t paying attention, you might have thought the restructure had done its job.

Meetings continued. People nodded. Cameras stayed off a little longer than before. Questions became shorter. Safer. The ambitious ones disappeared first. What remained were clarifications. Updates. Neutral observations that didn’t risk anything.

I was there, loosely. Like a cat who technically doesn’t belong in the meeting but keeps finding the warmest patch of sun near the window. No one minded. Everyone was too busy being fine.

That’s when the patterns started to surface.

One person began blocking their calendar for “deep work.” Another developed a recurring dentist appointment every other Friday. Someone who used to volunteer for everything went quiet in that careful, adult way that passes for maturity if you don’t know what you’re looking at.

This is the part that always looks like stability.

It isn’t.

It’s observation. Quiet recalculation. People don’t panic after a restructure. They watch. They note who was let go. They note how it was handled. They note what wasn’t said. Then, slowly and without fuss, they decide how much longer they want to be here when the next sentence lands.

It’s also the point where someone, somewhere outside the organisation, is already nodding along. Reading the situation perfectly. You can feel it when the story lands. When it doesn’t sound theoretical. When it sounds familiar enough that people stop liking the post and start tagging each other instead.

That’s when patterns surface.

Your role is safe.
For now.

The organisation moved on quickly after that.

Calendars refilled. Meetings resumed. The restructure was marked complete. Three roles removed. Impact contained. Stability restored.

One person didn’t get to feel that relief.

He had been there thirty-three years.

Long enough that no one quite remembered when he’d arrived. Long enough that parts of the business still ran on decisions he’d made before half the room had email addresses. Long enough that his name no longer appeared on projects because his work had quietly become infrastructure.

He wasn’t senior leadership. He wasn’t visible on the org chart in a way that impressed anyone external. He didn’t post thought leadership or talk about leveraging synergies.

He just knew how things worked.

Where the risks were buried. Which shortcuts always came back to bite. Who to call when something broke in a way the documentation didn’t cover.

People went to him before they went to their managers. Not to complain. To check. To sanity-test. To ask the kind of questions you don’t want to put in writing because the answer is complicated and the consequences matter.

He remembered why decisions had been made, not just that they had been made. He remembered what the company had tried once and quietly abandoned. He remembered which clients were forgiving and which weren’t. He remembered the real reasons behind policies that now lived as bullet points in onboarding decks.

He was the person new managers leaned on without realising they were doing it.

When his role was eliminated, it was described as unfortunate but necessary. A consequence of alignment. A clean cut. Part of the discipline everyone had just been reassured was good for the business.

There was no scandal. No performance issue. No dramatic exit.

Just a meeting. A conversation. A careful explanation about change.

He took it calmly. He always did.

People noticed the absence before they noticed the reason.

Questions started circling back unanswered. Decisions took longer. Small things stalled in ways no one could quite explain. A few people tried to fill the gap, earnestly, but without the context he’d carried quietly for decades.

Leadership didn’t panic. There was no obvious fire.

From a distance, it still looked like stability.

Up close, it looked like erosion.

What left with him wasn’t just experience. It was confidence. The unspoken assurance that someone in the room had seen this before and knew where it ended. Without that, conversations got safer. Narrower. Less ambitious.

People stopped asking the questions that relied on memory.

And then something else happened.

The people who had watched how his departure was handled began to adjust their own timelines.

Not dramatically. Not emotionally.

Practically.

They noticed how little warning there had been. How little ceremony. How quickly the organisation had moved on from someone who had given it most of his working life.

They took that information seriously.

This is the part companies don’t measure.

They count the role that was removed. They count the savings. They count the reduction in headcount.

They don’t count the recalibration that follows.

They don’t count the trust that quietly drains out of the system when loyalty is revealed to be a weak form of protection.

They don’t count the way people lower their personal exposure once they understand the rules more clearly.

No one storms out after a Lifetimer leaves.

They just stop assuming the company will look after them in the long run.

They start thinking in shorter horizons. More portable terms.

They start preparing.

At some point, I notice myself getting closer.

Like a cat hopping onto a desk. Close enough to see what people do when they think no one important is watching.

One employee has LinkedIn open in a background tab, half-hidden behind a slide deck. Not scrolling. Just there.

Another is rewriting the same email for the third time, careful to sound neutral. Agreeable. Unremarkable.

Someone else is Googling a job title they don’t quite believe they’re allowed to want yet.

None of this looks like panic.

It doesn’t even look like dissatisfaction.

It looks like preparation.

This is the moment most companies miss. Because nothing is technically wrong.

Work is still getting done. Meetings are still attended. Deliverables still land.

If you’re measuring engagement by output, everything looks fine.

But the decision has already shifted.

People don’t leave immediately after a restructure.

They leave when the dust settles. When the story hardens. When “your role is safe” stops sounding like reassurance and starts sounding like a temporary arrangement someone else controls.

In the ninety days that followed, six more people left.

Different teams. Different reasons, officially.

Better offers. Personal decisions. Timing.

Not close enough together to trigger alarm.

Not far enough apart to be coincidence.

From the outside, it reads as calm.

From close enough, it’s clearly motion.

— Ella Hays
I don’t have an MBA.
I just know what it looks like when good people disappear slowly, quietly,
and no one notices until it shows up in the numbers.

If this felt familiar, you’re not imagining it.
You’re just paying attention.