Every week, another goodbye thread shows up on my LinkedIn feed. "After ten incredible years, I've decided to start a new chapter." We all know the language. We all know what it actually means.
I keep thinking about how many of those threads belong to people I respect. The careful ones. The ones who actually read the docs. The ones who'd jump on a 2 AM page when production broke. The ones who quietly shipped the migration that saved their company millions, and then quietly took the severance email when the same company decided they were "redundant."
The same week one of those threads went up in March, I read a different headline: Adam Neumann had raised hundreds of millions for a new real estate startup. Same Adam Neumann who incinerated $44 billion of WeWork value. Same Neumann whose 2019 IPO collapsed so publicly that Apple TV+ made a series about it. He was getting another shot. The person whose Slack goodbye I'd just read was doing leetcode at thirty-seven, trying to land a phone screen.
I'm not saying this is a new pattern. I'm saying I'm tired of pretending it isn't a pattern.
The shape of who lands soft
I've been in this industry since 2017. I've sat in interview rooms in three countries. I've watched the people who get hired, the people who get laid off, the people who fail upward into board seats and the people who get quietly let go after a reorg. I've started to notice something I want to say out loud.
The people falling through the cracks are not the people you'd expect.
They're the women who shipped the infrastructure but didn't take credit for it. They're the engineers from underrepresented backgrounds who built the systems everyone else now takes for granted. They're the careful ones, the patient ones, the ones who do the work nobody else wants to do because somebody has to.
The people landing softly are the ones who fit a particular shape. The shape is recognisable enough by now that we have a name for it. Tech bro. The startup-founder energy. The "moving fast" pose. The willingness to overpromise to a board. The shorts and the slides and the swagger.
I'm not saying every man in tech is a tech bro. I work alongside men I deeply respect, men who do the actual work, men who hold space for people who don't look like them. I'm saying there's a particular pattern. Confident. Willing to hand-wave through what they don't know. Comfortable taking up space in a room. That pattern gets rewarded over and over even when the underlying work falls apart.
Sam Bankman-Fried. Adam Neumann. There are dozens more whose names you'd recognise. The point isn't that they failed. The point is that when they failed, the next round of capital was already being lined up. The point is that when my friends failed, and they didn't fail, their company failed, the next round was twelve weeks of severance and a polite reminder about COBRA.
What the data actually says
There's a study from the Journal of Social Issues that I keep coming back to. They gave participants identical résumés but paired them with different photos. The men who looked like the "nerdy programmer" stereotype got rated as more competent and more hireable than men who didn't fit it, and dramatically more than women with the same résumé.
The appearance of belonging is doing more work in our hiring decisions than the actual contribution to the codebase.
Let me say what I think this means in plain language. We have built an industry where the right haircut, the right t-shirt, the right vibe matter more than the actual code on the screen. People who look the part fail upward. People who don't look the part work twice as hard to be seen at all.
The National Center for Women & Information Technology reports that women hold only 25% of computing roles in the US. I used to read that number and feel sad about it. I now read it and feel like I'm being lied to about why.
It's not a pipeline problem. I've sat on hiring committees. I've watched brilliant women not get the offer because they "didn't seem like a culture fit." I've watched men with shakier résumés get the offer because they "had founder energy." If the pipeline were really the problem, the women I know who are already in the pipeline wouldn't keep falling out of it.
What I want us to actually do
I don't have a clean ending for this. I don't think there's a five-step plan you can paste into your DEI slide deck. I'll tell you what I do think.
The first thing is: notice it. The next time you're in a hiring conversation and someone "doesn't seem like a fit," ask what specifically they don't fit. The next time someone with a recognisable startup-founder vibe gets the benefit of the doubt, ask what evidence they're being given the benefit on. The next time a colleague gets laid off and you find out months later that someone with half their track record landed somewhere bigger and louder, hold that information. Don't swallow it.
The second thing is: tell the stories. The women I know who left tech didn't leave because they couldn't hack it. They left because they got tired of the second-shift work of being constantly underestimated, of having to prove the same thing in three different rooms, of explaining their seniority over and over. The more these stories stay private, the more the pattern looks like individual failures instead of a structural one.
The third thing, and this one is for me as much as anyone, is to keep showing up for the people the industry overlooks. The friend doing leetcode at thirty-seven. The intern from a non-target school who deserves a real shot. The senior engineer who got pushed out in a reorg and is rebuilding in private. They're not failing. They're navigating a system that wasn't built with them in mind, and the least we can do is help each other see it clearly.
The road to actually changing this is long and I don't pretend to have a map for it. But I do think it starts with refusing to keep pretending the comeback story is randomly distributed. It isn't. We can name that. And once we can name it, we can start asking the harder question:
Why are we still funding it?