As It Turns Out, People Were Doing Something

This is the part of the story that has the particular quality of a joke someone tells at a dinner party, slowly realizing it's actually about them. Google laid off thousands of engineers in 2023. Then it found itself, some time later, urgently needing people who deeply understood how its systems worked. According to reporting by CNBC, roughly one in five of Google's AI engineering hires in 2025 were former employees. People who had been let go were being invited back. Often at higher salaries than before. This is happening across the industry. The pattern, wherever it appears, tells the same story: institutional knowledge doesn't appear on a balance sheet until it's gone. At which point it appears, briefly and expensively, as a line item under contractor fees. Companies remove experienced people. They discover that experienced people were doing something. They attempt to acquire more experienced people. Sometimes the same ones. With a slightly awkward email and a revised offer letter. There's nothing malicious in this. It's simply what happens when something invisible becomes suddenly, undeniably visible. Experience has a way of making itself known, usually at the worst possible moment, in the most expensive way available. What strikes me now, with a little distance, is not the frustration of it. It's how predictable it was, and how surprised everyone seemed anyway. Institutional knowledge is the thing every company says it values and almost none of them have a plan to keep. The ones that figure that out first will have a significant advantage. Some of them are already figuring it out, one awkward rehiring email at a time.