Over the last two months, I spent time doing in-depth research with women in tech conversations about what's happening right now, what it feels like, and what it's costing people. I went in expecting to hear about burnout, job market frustration, and career uncertainty. Those things did come up. What I didn't expect was the level of grief.
Before I share what I found, one thing needs to be named: every single person I spoke with had experienced at least one layoff in the last four years. Every single one. I've been through three myself. That's not a series of individual setbacks. That's a pattern of systemic instability that has fundamentally changed how people relate to work.
Here's what that looks like from the inside.
Layoffs are causing compounding, recurring trauma.
This isn't hyperbole. The women I spoke with described symptoms that look like PTSD: hypervigilance, rumination about what's coming next, difficulty trusting team dynamics. And this wasn't limited to people who'd been laid off — it affected the people who survived layoffs too. Watching colleagues lose their jobs and then being expected to show up the next day like everything was normal does something to a person.
Once people land in new roles, they describe carrying an emotional residue with them — an impending sense of doom, waiting for the next shoe to drop. One participant said something that stopped me. She believed that part of her now thinks every environment is going to be bad, and that belief is blocking her from being able to imagine what a healthy workplace even looks like.
"That's what repeated systemic trauma does to people. It makes them lose hope in a different kind of way. It makes them think it's them when it's not. It's the system."
Burnout is systemic — but we're internalizing it as a personal failing.
Almost every woman I spoke with was in some state of burnout. They understood, intellectually, that their exhaustion was a product of their environment — shrinking teams, shifting org structures, unclear return-to-office mandates, unsupportive managers. And yet they were still asking themselves whether they could push through a little more. Endure a little longer.
One person described feeling like she was in "soul debt." She ultimately took a self-imposed sabbatical just to process what her team had been through — and in this job market, that tells you something about how bad it had gotten.
The cruelty in this dynamic is real: the system creates the conditions for burnout, and then it signals to people that they're not performing well enough. That's not a motivation problem. That's corporate gaslighting.
The job market isn't just hard — it's eroding people's sense of self.
The women I spoke with described a demoralizing loop: making it to final-round interviews only to lose to a runner-up; being told they were overqualified; sending applications into silence and never hearing back. It stopped feeling like a process and started feeling like evidence — even when they knew that wasn't true.
LinkedIn came up constantly — not just as a frustration, but as a genuine values conflict. People who've spent years doing serious, substantive work are being asked to market themselves like a personal brand. The performance of it, the packaging of it, feels at odds with how they actually want to show up professionally. And for women who were already depleted before the search even started, that friction is significant.
Managers are everything — and bad ones were everywhere.
Manager quality came up in almost every conversation I had. What became clear: the relationship between a manager and their direct report is the single biggest factor in whether someone feels okay at work. More than company mission. More than compensation. More than the work itself.
The patterns were consistent: managers who took credit for work that wasn't theirs; who went cold without explanation; who were performative in public and gave critical feedback in private; who delivered feedback in ways that felt more like punishment than guidance. And because there were no safe channels to address any of it — no HR that felt trustworthy, no skip-level that felt safe — most people just masked.
"I don't feel like I can trust my manager. If I aired my feelings, it would be used against me."
That kind of sustained masking doesn't just add to the exhaustion. It becomes its own form of harm.
The grief underneath all of it hasn't been named.
Most of us in tech were sold a story: if you work hard, results will follow. That story isn't holding anymore. And losing it — losing the version of work that used to feel meaningful, the professional identity that no longer fits, the industry that shifted while we were just trying to keep up and pay the bills — is a loss. It deserves to be named as one.
I left these conversations carrying my own grief that I hadn't fully acknowledged. And I noticed something: grief asks for something different than burnout does. Burnout asks for rest, boundaries, recovery. Grief asks for witnessing. Someone to sit with you through the loss before you can move forward.
We're missing the mark on support right now. We don't need more wellness apps or daily doses of inspiration. We need practical tools, honest conversations, and community. And we need to stop asking people to fix themselves in response to a broken system.
Asking people to fix themselves in response to a broken system isn't just ineffective. It's gaslighting.
If anything you've read here sounds like your life, I want you to know: you're not alone, and it's not you.
I'm building something with you in mind at Learn Mindfully. You can find out what's coming at learnmindfully.co. And this episode of In Her Words is available wherever you listen to podcasts.