What CEOs Really Regret After Cutting Thousands of Jobs in 2026

In a column published May 22, 2026, Inc Magazine writer Joe Procopio wrote that he finally got CEOs behind 2026's mass layoffs to talk on background. His opening line lands like a confession: "CEOs don't have to beg for forgiveness, but they need to stop making excuses." It is one of the most direct things any business publication has published about the human cost of this layoff cycle, and it arrives the same week Meta cut 8,000 jobs via 4 a.m. email. At Metaintro, we read every CEO memo so you don't have to, and Procopio's reporting reflects what laid-off workers have been saying all along.

What did Procopio's reporting actually find?

Procopio is not a stranger to the layoff beat. Earlier in the week he wrote a column placing the blame for the Meta cuts on the heads of leadership teams, arguing that AI, macroeconomics, and market shifts are not excuses that exempt the leadership team from blame. Then he wrote a follow-up about Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow, who publicly blamed HR and entitled employees instead. According to Procopio's reporting, both columns drew responses that surprised him: many executives wrote in agreeing the blame belonged to leadership, but only on the condition that he keep them anonymous. That, in itself, is the story of the 2026 layoff wave: public posture pointing at AI or macro headwinds, private acknowledgment of bad hiring, weak performance management, and panic at the board level.

Why are CEOs only willing to talk anonymously?

The short answer is investors, and the only slightly longer answer is liability. A sitting tech CEO who says on the record that the 8,000 cuts were the leadership team's fault has handed every plaintiff lawyer in the country a quote, and probably triggered a board conversation about whether the CEO themselves should be next. Compare that to the safe version of the same admission, the version that ran in the press release: organizational efficiency, AI-native restructuring, smaller pods and cohorts. The phrasing is so consistent across companies because it is being copied from one announcement to the next. Behind closed doors, Procopio reports, the leaders he spoke with were far blunter. They are not pretending the cuts were inevitable. They are calling them what they are, which is a correction for over-hiring during the 2021 and 2022 boom, layered on top of a slow-motion bet that AI will let them run leaner forever. The problem with anonymity is that workers cannot use it. A laid-off engineer at Microsoft cannot tell a recruiter the real reason their team was cut if the CEO will only say it on background.

What kinds of regrets are showing up most often?

Across Procopio's reporting and the broader pattern of 2026 layoff coverage at Metaintro, the regrets cluster into a few buckets. The first is hiring regret. Many of the leaders now cutting headcount were the same ones who over-hired during the pandemic boom and never managed performance on the way up, which left them with bloated middle layers and no real way to reduce them other than a blunt mass cut. The second is the AI bet. CEOs are quietly worried that the public story about AI replacing roles is running ahead of the technology, and that they will look foolish in eighteen months when productivity numbers do not improve. The third is communication. Almost none of the leaders Procopio talked to defended the 4 a.m. email format, the access revocations, or the impersonal cadence. Several admitted that the Meta-style notification process is its own reputational injury, separate from the layoff itself, and that they would do it differently if they could.

How does this compare to the 2024 and 2025 layoff waves?

Procopio frames 2026 as on pace to be heavier than 2025, which was itself heavier than 2024. That tracks with what we have been seeing across the tech sector and beyond. In 2024, the dominant narrative was inflation and rate hikes. In 2025, it shifted to "right-sizing" after the pandemic boom. In 2026, the story is AI, and that change in framing matters because it shifts the burden away from leadership decisions and onto an external technological force that nobody can argue with. Behind closed doors, several CEOs told Procopio they know that framing is convenient. It absolves the people who made the original hiring decisions. It also makes it easier for boards to greenlight further cuts without scrutinizing whether the company genuinely needs them. The result is a kind of momentum, where each round of cuts at one company makes it easier for the next company to do the same, and the cumulative effect is the layoff wave we are watching now.

What does this mean for laid-off workers right now?

If you were one of the 8,000 cut at Meta, the 3,000 at Intuit, the 1,000 at Walmart corporate, the 4,000 at Cisco, the Microsoft 5 percent, or any of the dozens of other 2026 cohorts, the most useful thing to take from Procopio's column is that the framing was not personal. The CEOs themselves are telling reporters, on background, that these cuts were leadership decisions, not performance decisions. That matters when you are rewriting your resume and trying to explain a gap in your timeline. You are not selling against your old performance. You are selling against a hiring market that is still suspicious of laid-off workers, and the most powerful counter to that suspicion is documentation that says the cut was strategic and broad, not targeted at you. Procopio's column is now part of that documentation.

What should CEOs be doing differently, according to the ones who talked?

Procopio does not name the executives, but he summarizes their advice consistently. Do not announce mass layoffs by email at 4 a.m. Do not revoke access before the affected employees have read the message. Do not blame AI when the real cause is over-hiring. Do not cite "efficiency" when the meaningful number is the stock buyback. Several of the leaders he interviewed argued that transparency about the actual financial pressure, even when it is unflattering, costs less in reputation than the current playbook of euphemism and 4 a.m. emails. The catch, Procopio writes, is that none of them are willing to be the first to break formation. It is the same dynamic that produces the layoffs in the first place: every leadership team waits to see what every other leadership team does, and then copies the version that draws the least Wall Street pushback. The CEOs themselves are aware of the pattern. They just cannot, or will not, exit it alone.

What does the regret pattern reveal about how layoff decisions actually get made?

The Procopio reporting peels back something workers rarely get to see, which is the actual decision sequence behind a mass layoff. The public story usually goes board to CEO to all-hands email, in that order, framed as a strategic response to market conditions. The private story Procopio describes runs more like this. A quarterly review surfaces a margin gap. A finance team models headcount reductions as the fastest lever. A consulting firm or an outside advisor validates the model. A board pushes for action ahead of the next earnings call. A CEO who is not personally close to the affected teams approves a number. Middle managers are told to identify cuts inside a window that is usually less than two weeks. HR drafts the email. The CEO signs it. The 4 a.m. send is chosen because it minimizes the chance of leaks, employee resistance, or a same-day press cycle. By the time the workforce reads the email, the entire decision is weeks old. None of this is illegal. Almost none of it is unusual. But it is also not the deliberate, strategic AI transformation that the press release describes. It is a sequence of cost decisions wrapped in a vision statement after the fact. The reason CEOs want anonymity is that admitting this publicly would invite questions about whether the vision was retrofitted onto the cost cut, which is a much less defensible position than "we are adapting to AI."

How do severance and outplacement support fit into the regret picture?

One thread that runs through almost every recent layoff announcement at major employers is the gap between the headline severance number and the actual workplace impact for laid-off employees. Severance packages at large employers in 2026 typically include several weeks of pay, benefits continuation, and outplacement services from a third-party vendor. Those numbers can sound generous in the press release. In practice, the runway evaporates faster than expected once health insurance premiums kick in, and the outplacement vendors are often the same generic services workers find on their own. The severance program at most large employers is built as much for the legal release of claims as for the employee's transition. Workers sign away the right to sue in exchange for a few months of runway. That is the actual trade. What several of the CEOs reflected on, per Procopio, is the gap between paying for a generic outplacement contract and paying for genuine career-transition support, particularly for engineers and managers whose skill stacks need recalibration for an AI-adjacent market. The cost difference is small at the per-employee level and enormous at the workforce level, which is why almost no company chooses the latter.

What signals should job seekers watch for in upcoming layoff announcements?

If Procopio's reporting is right that the framing of these cuts is bending the truth, then the most useful skill for any worker in this market is reading layoff announcements skeptically. A few signals worth tracking. First, look at the ratio between the announced number and the actual employees affected. Many companies count only corporate roles in the public number, then quietly attrit additional retail or contract workers later. Second, watch the language. "Restructuring," "rightsizing," "delayering," and "operating-model evolution" are euphemisms that tend to mean leadership has not yet decided on the strategic rationale and is reaching for a vocabulary that delays scrutiny. Third, watch for executives leaving alongside the layoff. If the CHRO or COO departs within thirty days of a workforce reduction, it usually means the cuts were not the only thing the board wanted changed. Fourth, watch the share price. Layoffs that genuinely improve a business produce a share-price bump that lasts more than a quarter. Layoffs that are cosmetic produce a brief pop followed by a slow drift down, which is the Cisco pattern Wall Street has gotten used to. The CEOs Procopio interviewed know all of this. They are watching the same signals from the other side of the desk. The fact that they are now telling a reporter, on background, that the system is broken is itself a signal worth taking seriously when planning your next move.

What does this mean for the next round of layoffs already being planned?

If Procopio's anonymous CEOs are correct that the 2026 wave is being driven by leadership inertia rather than economic necessity, then the next round of cuts is already on the way, and the timing is predictable. The pattern across the past three layoff cycles shows that mass-layoff announcements cluster in two windows. The first is late January through early March, after Q4 earnings give boards their first hard look at full-year cost structure. The second is mid-May through early June, after Q1 results clarify whether the prior year's bets are paying off, which is exactly the window the Meta cut, the Intuit cut, and the latest GitLab restructure all landed in. For job seekers, the practical takeaway is that the hiring freeze you are hitting now is not the bottom. Companies that have not yet cut will likely cut once their boards see what peers got away with. The window to land a role before a fresh wave is narrower than the headlines suggest, and the workers who move fastest in the next four to six weeks will be the ones who reach hiring managers before those managers are themselves told to freeze. Procopio's reporting does not say this directly, but the implication runs through every CEO admission he summarizes. The CEOs are not done. They are just waiting for cover.

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People Also Asked

Q: Who are the CEOs Joe Procopio talked to about regretting mass layoffs?

A: Procopio kept his sources anonymous at their request. In his May 22, 2026 Inc Magazine column, he reported the executives spoke with him on background, which means the regrets are described without naming the leaders. The pattern he summarizes is consistent with what other 2026 layoff coverage has been turning up, which is leaders acknowledging mistakes in private while keeping the public message focused on AI and efficiency.

Q: How many tech workers have been laid off in 2026 so far?

A: Specific numbers are still moving, but the Meta cut alone was 8,000, Intuit added 3,000, Microsoft cut roughly 5 percent of its workforce, and Cisco eliminated 4,000 roles. Procopio writes that the year is on track to exceed both 2024 and 2025, both of which were already historically heavy. Metaintro's running coverage tracks the cumulative count.

Q: Why do CEOs blame AI for layoffs when they regret the cuts in private?

A: Because the AI framing protects them from accountability for earlier hiring decisions. If a layoff is the result of an unstoppable technological shift, no individual executive is to blame. If it is the result of over-hiring during the 2021 boom, the leadership team that made those hires is. Procopio's reporting suggests the CEOs themselves understand this gap and find it uncomfortable, but none of them are willing to be the first to publicly break the AI framing for fear of Wall Street and board pushback.

Looking for your next opportunity, with Metaintro you can skip the cold-email roulette and let our AI introduce you directly to companies that are actively hiring. Every layoff, every hire, every shift in the job market, so you know where to go next.