How do you tell if you are going to be laid off?

Most people think layoffs start as a headcount decision. In real life they start as a business model problem that runs out of places to hide. Revenue stalls while cost lines stay stubborn. Retention softens just as acquisition gets pricier. Unit economics lose their story. HR signs the paperwork at the end. Finance writes the script at the start. If you want to predict your personal risk, stop watching the rumor mill and start watching the operational truth that leaders cannot spin for long.

The first place to look is the math the company lives on, not the slogans. If you work in a product or platform business, track whether usage is still converting into money at the same rate as last quarter. When daily active rises but paid conversion lags, support tickets grow faster than revenue, or infrastructure spend eats a larger slice of gross profit, the model is blinking red even if the dashboard looks green. In SaaS, listen for quiet changes in how leadership talks about net revenue retention. When net revenue retention drops and the story shifts to logo growth, someone is cushioning churn. In consumer apps, compare new user spikes to refund rates, fraud write-offs, or promo intensity. A promotion that never seems to end is not generosity. It is cost of demand.

Roadmaps telegraph layoffs earlier than press releases. When the company starts shrinking surface area, it is preparing to shrink the team. Projects do not die; they get parked behind language like refocus, sequence, or simplify. Watch for features being archived in the tracker, long-running experiments closed without a post-mortem, or design reviews that stop asking for polish and start asking for deprecation plans. Platform consolidation is rational. It is also a headcount signal because every retired lane frees up staffing that will not be redeployed. If a team that once owned a full funnel is told to become a platform or internal service, you just witnessed a margin move that rarely preserves the original headcount.

Hiring behavior is one of the cleanest tells because it sits at the intersection of finance and narrative. Requisitions that stay open for months, then vanish from the career site without a replacement, mean budgets have been swept. Backfills that used to be automatic but now require two extra signatures are not actually backfills. Recruiters who stop talking about pipelines and start talking about employer brand projects are not sitting on a wave of offers. If a company introduces a new job architecture during a hiring freeze, it is not about clarity. It is about creating a grid that makes reductions look methodical.

Expense policy reveals the temperature of the burn. Leaders will not say burn in public. They will rename it discipline. You will see it in suddenly enforced travel approvals, vendor consolidation sprints, or a push to migrate from best-of-breed tools to a bundle that looks cheaper on paper. Procurement starts winning internal arguments. Finance embeds inside product reviews. Even trivial purchases get routed through a central queue. The company is measuring control, not speed.

Sales and success tell the second half of the story. Pipeline softness travels through the building faster than any memo. If sales leaders begin highlighting activity metrics over closed revenue, if comp plans are rewritten midyear, or if free tiers gain new limits framed as fairness, the business is pulling the only levers it can while the market withholds momentum. Customer success headcount moving from proactive to reactive ratios is not a management preference. It is demand triage. When enterprise deals start slipping to next quarter and marketing funnels pivot to webinars about value, you are already inside the stretch.

Language shifts before the org chart does. Leaders under pressure speak in shorter horizons. They move from three year ambition to this quarter focus. They stop naming long-term bets and start praising resiliency. They promote managers who are good at saying no. Town halls that used to celebrate product wins start celebrating efficiency awards. All-hands questions about strategy get answered with lists of principles. When executives repeat that nothing changes for customers while everything changes internally, you are witnessing a containment strategy, not a steady state.

Access is an underappreciated signal because it feels administrative. It is not. If your team loses data access that helped you forecast, or cross-functional meetings disappear without replacement, you are being moved from shaping to reporting. Badge restrictions after hours, narrower permissions in analytics, and sudden requests to document what used to be implicit are not about security hygiene alone. They are about making transitions cleaner for whoever inherits your workload. A tight push on documentation with no matching roadmap expansion is a pre-exit chore list.

Performance processes often get sharper right before cuts. Calibration meetings extend. The curve hardens. Criteria get rewritten to emphasize business impact over craft. It sounds rational, and it is, but the timing matters. When the company needs air, performance frameworks become allocation tools. Mentions of leadership principles rise as mentions of career ladders fall. If managers begin pre-briefing you for reviews with unusual specificity and an unusual number of witnesses on the calendar, they are preparing artifacts, not coaching.

Cost lines that rarely make the front page can warn you as clearly as a leaked memo. Cloud spend audits that turn into platform migrations do not produce quick savings without dramatic scope changes. If your team owns features with spiky compute patterns and you are told to smooth them at any cost, you are sitting on a budget line under scrutiny. Content moderation, trust and safety, or support teams that once measured success by response time but now measure it by staffing ratios are being asked to carry margin. In marketplaces and ad-funded models, look for silent cuts to minimum guarantees or creator incentives. Supply leaves before demand knows, and then demand leaves. Headcount follows both.

If you work in finance adjacent roles, you will feel the air change even sooner. Weekly forecast reviews replace monthly. Cash posts arrive earlier in the week. Department leaders get their own variance packages instead of a single roll-up. The board cadence tightens. Consultants appear with phrases like zero-based budgeting and operational redesign. No one hires an outside firm to admire the org. They hire one to redraw it.

Now the personal part, which most people ignore until it is late. Your own workload is the clearest mirror. If your projects become oddly self-contained and less interdependent with core revenue paths, you have been moved to the periphery. If the dependencies that used to run through your team are being rerouted, someone is reducing blast radius. If your manager starts talking about resilience and growth outside your current scope, they may be trying to help you land elsewhere without saying it. Their calendar becomes your forecast. A manager who goes dark on headcount planning is not protecting you. They are being excluded.

There are also false alarms. Startups tighten costs to survive. Mature companies refactor to increase speed. Not every freeze ends in a cut. The difference shows up in whether leadership is building toward a sharper thesis or simply subtracting surface area to hit a number. If the narrative narrows into a clear bet with measurable milestones, you are in a rebuild. If the narrative dissolves into values and hygiene while actual metrics get less visible, you are in a wind-down.

So what do you do when the signals stack up. Start by turning visibility into options. Pair your observable signals with your own map of value created in the last two quarters, expressed in numbers the business cares about. Reduce ambiguity for your manager by articulating how your next quarter’s work directly reduces cost, drives revenue, or removes risk. Ask for the most uncomfortable clarity you can get without asking for the decision. What problem should my team unquestionably own in the next ninety days. What outcome will be used to judge that work. If the answers are vague, they are not vague by accident.

Next, shift your posture from defender to builder. Propose a cut that increases your unit’s leverage rather than waiting to be assigned one. Offer a consolidation plan for overlapping tools your team can realistically absorb. Write the deprecation memo for a feature you know is dragging margin and pitch the migration with a small task force you can lead. People who turn cost pressure into coherent simplification become the people who stay to run the simpler system.

Finally, treat your risk like an operator, not a passenger. Update your portfolio and pipeline while you still have high-ground narrative. Reconnect with past managers, customers, and collaborators before they become references rather than peers. Ship something visible that demonstrates you know where the company must go now, not where it wanted to go last year. If the outcome still arrives, you leave with fresh proof of relevance and a network warmed by current work, not nostalgia.

Here is the quiet truth most employees learn the hard way. The email is not the shock. The silence that comes before it is the shock. If you train yourself to read the product math, the budget choreography, and the language drift, you will not just spot risk earlier. You will move differently inside the same company. You will optimize for pressure that actually matters. You will make yourself easier to keep. That is how to tell if you are going to be laid off, and it is also how to make the call less likely.