u/kamilc86

Seeing this come up a lot lately, both in conversations with peers and online. Instead of announcing layoffs, companies seem to be squeezing people out gradually. Workload dries up, you start getting vague feedback about "areas of growth," then you're placed on a PIP with goals that feel designed to be missed. A few weeks later you're either resigning or getting terminated for "performance." No severance, no announcement. Headcount shrinks and nobody outside HR notices.

A Zety survey from late 2025 found about three quarters of employees believe they've experienced some form of this. BambooHR found that a quarter of C-level execs straight up admitted they hope return to office mandates push people to quit voluntarily.

There have been reports of large firms reclassifying obvious layoffs as performance separations. I've seen at least one account of someone trying to figure out if they even qualify for unemployment because their employer tagged it as a discharge rather than a layoff.

The whole setup shifts the cost from the company to the individual. No severance, messy unemployment claims, and a termination framing that follows you around.

Software stocks just hit their worst stretch since 2008. Forward P/E multiples for SaaS companies dropped below the S&P 500 for the first time in history. Wall Street coined a whole term for it: the "SaaSpocalypse."

The fear: AI agents do the work, companies cut headcount, fewer seats get purchased. Salesforce down 26%, Adobe down 32%, ServiceNow cratering.

But the actual earnings tell a different story. ServiceNow subscription revenue grew 21% YoY last quarter. Snowflake grew 30%. RPO pipelines are still expanding.

Jensen Huang says the panic is "illogical" because agents still need the underlying software to function.

Anyone here actually lost customers to seat compression yet, or is this still a Wall Street narrative that hasn't hit the ground?

Seeing this come up a lot lately, both in conversations with peers and online. Instead of announcing layoffs, companies seem to be squeezing people out gradually. Workload dries up, you start getting vague feedback about "areas of growth," then you're placed on a PIP with goals that feel designed to be missed. A few weeks later you're either resigning or getting terminated for "performance." No severance, no announcement. Headcount shrinks and nobody outside HR notices.

A Zety survey from late 2025 found about three quarters of employees believe they've experienced some form of this. BambooHR found that a quarter of C-level execs straight up admitted they hope return to office mandates push people to quit voluntarily.

There have been reports of large firms reclassifying obvious layoffs as performance separations. I've seen at least one account of someone trying to figure out if they even qualify for unemployment because their employer tagged it as a discharge rather than a layoff.

The whole setup shifts the cost from the company to the individual. No severance, messy unemployment claims, and a termination framing that follows you around.

A MyPerfectResume survey of 753 US recruiters found that 81% say their employers deliberately post ghost jobs. Greenhouse analyzed their own platform data and found 18 to 22% of postings in any given quarter are ghosts. In the UK, StandOut CV looked at over 91,000 listings and found 34% were likely fakes.

Why companies do this: they want to look like theyre growing (good for investors), they want overworked teams to think help is coming, and they want to collect resumes for roles that might open eventually.

BLS data from mid 2025 shows employers reported 7.4 million open positions but only hired 5.2 million people. Thats over 2 million postings that went nowhere, and that gap has held steady since 2021.

Red flags to watch for: listing up 30+ days with no changes. Company under a known hiring freeze. Same role getting "refreshed" with a new date but identical text. nobody at the company on LinkedIn who seems to be running the search.

Regulators are slowly waking up. Ontario passed a law taking effect January 1 this year requiring employers with 25+ employees to disclose if a posting is for a real vacancy and respond to interviewed candidates within 45 days. california introduced a similar bill that passed the Assembly but stalled in the Senate. The FTC formed a labor task force in early 2025 with deceptive job advertising as a priority.

In Europe there's no specific ghost job legislation yet, but the IAPP published an analysis arguing that ghost jobs likely violate GDPR. If a company collects your personal data through a fake listing with no real hiring intent, they cant claim legitimate interest as a lawful basis for processing that data. The EU Pay Transparency Directive kicking in June 2026 will also make ghost jobs harder to pull off since companies will need to include real salary ranges in postings. it wont kill the practice but it adds another layer of accountability.