I keep a folder of layoff memos on my laptop. As of writing there are 61 in it, going back to 2022, and I started it for a self-interested reason: I wanted to know what a company sounds like eight weeks before it quietly stops hiring. When you're the one sending applications, tech layoffs aren't news. They're a weather report on whether the four roles you applied to last Tuesday still exist.
Monday.com's memo went into the folder as number 61. Roughly 20% of the company — around 630 people — announced by co-founder and CEO Eran Zinman in a note that circulated widely enough to get republished intact. It reads well. That is neither a compliment nor an accusation. It's the thing worth noticing first.
The verdict, in one sentence: Zinman's memo is among the better-constructed layoff communications I've read, and how well it's written tells you close to nothing about whether Monday.com is a safe place to send your resume — but two specific structural claims inside it tell you a great deal.
I'm going to walk through how I read documents like this now, because I used to read them badly, and reading them badly cost me a real opportunity.
What most people do
There are two standard ways to handle a memo like this, and I've done both.
The first is to read it as a character test. Is this CEO a decent person or a spin artist? Is "painful" sincere? Did he take a pay cut? People forward the memo to each other and argue about word choice for two days, and the argument feels like analysis because it involves close reading. It isn't analysis. It's a referendum on tone. Whether the person who wrote it is sincere and whether the company will have a headcount slot for you in October are unrelated questions, and the first one is more emotionally satisfying, which is exactly why it eats the afternoon.
The second is to treat the number as a verdict and delete the company from your list. Twenty percent gone, so the roles are gone, so cross it off. I did this with Wayfair after a January cut. It felt like discipline — protecting my limited energy, not wasting applications on a sinking ship. Within two quarters their careers page had engineering roles posted again. A company that cuts 630 people is not a company that has stopped hiring; it is a company that has changed what it hires for, and those are different facts with different consequences for you.
The common failure in both: the operational information in the memo goes unread. It's in there. It's the least quotable part, so nobody quotes it, so nobody reads it.
What the evidence suggests
I want to be straight with you about what evidence exists here, because this is a space where people will hand you a confident chart.
There is no clean study on whether AI-driven reorgs permanently reduce how many engineers a software company needs. There can't be yet. The companies restructuring around this thesis — Monday.com among them — have not been running the new shape long enough for anyone to compare outcomes against a control. Anybody telling you they know how this resolves is selling you a newsletter.
What does exist is the memos, and the careers pages, and the earnings calls, and the pattern across 61 documents. That's not science. It's field notes. Here's what the field notes say.
Most of a layoff memo is decorative. The gratitude, the acknowledgment that the decision was hard, the reassurance to departing staff that this isn't about their work quality — those matter enormously to the people receiving them, and they matter to how the company treats its own alumni, which is worth something. But they carry no information about the company's next twelve months. Every memo has them now. They've been standardized.
The load-bearing parts are narrower than you'd think. Does the memo describe a change to how work is organized, or only a number? Does it name something it's spending into, or does it stop at what it's cutting? Does it distinguish between fewer people doing the same work and a different set of work getting done? And where does it place the cause — inside the company's own past decisions, or out in "macro conditions"?
Monday.com's memo does the harder version of all four. It commits to flattening management layers, restructuring how the company goes to market, and reorganizing around AI-native product rather than trimming headcount to hit a margin target. It locates the cause internally: leadership built an org for a previous phase and is now rebuilding it. That last move is the one I weight most heavily, and not because it's noble. A company that blames the macro environment is telling you it has no thesis, which means the next cut arrives whenever the environment fails to improve. A company that says we chose this shape and it's wrong now has a thesis you can evaluate.
The other thing the field notes say, and this is the part that matters most if you have an application in flight: a company-wide percentage hides almost everything. A 20% cut can mean 4% of engineering or 45%. Cuts concentrated in sales, support, and middle management look identical in a headline to cuts that gut R&D. The memo's organizational detail is where that distinction lives, and Monday.com's memo — for all its clarity — does not give you a function-level breakdown. That's its most consequential omission.
What I actually do
Five criteria, in the order I apply them.
| What I look for | Why it decides something |
|---|---|
| Function-level detail, not the company percentage | Tells you whether your function was cut or merely shared a press release with the one that was |
| Layer language vs. headcount language | "Fewer layers" means specific management roles disappeared — possibly your would-be hiring manager |
| What they name as the growth bet | A company spending into something is a company that will need people for it |
| Where blame sits | Internal ownership predicts one restructuring; "macro conditions" predicts a series |
| Rehire timing on the careers page | The only claim in the whole exercise that gets verified rather than interpreted |
Then I do three concrete things.
I don't withdraw the application. Withdrawing costs me an option and gains me nothing; a company that no longer has the role will tell me, at no cost to me beyond the silence I was already getting.
I change my questions. If I reach a recruiter, I ask the reorg by name: which layers were removed, is this role a backfill for someone who left or new headcount created by the restructuring, and does the hiring manager for this position still hold the same scope they held in June. Recruiters answer these more often than you'd expect, partly because nobody asks them and partly because a candidate who read the memo carefully reads as a serious candidate.
And I watch reply latency. After a cut, the recruiting function is usually smaller than the pipeline it inherited. A three-week silence at a company that just cut 20% is not a rejection; treating it as one is how I talked myself out of following up twice in 2024.
The honest negatives on Monday.com's memo, since I won't hand you a document with no flaws: it addresses three audiences well and never states plainly what work is being stopped. It grounds its confidence in customer adoption signals without giving you a number you could check. And "flatter" has a cost the memo doesn't mention — the manager who would have argued for an unusual candidate in a hiring loop is often exactly the layer that got removed. If you're the non-obvious résumé, and you usually are if you're reading this, flatter orgs are not automatically good news for you.
Who this is for, and who it isn't
This is for you if you have an active application, a scheduled loop, or an offer at a company that just announced cuts, and you're trying to decide whether to keep spending time on it. Keep spending it. Change the questions, not the target.
It's also for you if you're inside a mid-size SaaS company reading your own leadership's language and trying to figure out what it means. The same four load-bearing questions apply to your all-hands slides.
It is not for you if you're using memo analysis as a substitute for applying. If you're six weeks in and reading your fourth restructuring announcement of the day, that's procrastination with a research alibi, and I know because I've built that habit and it produced no callbacks. Read one carefully, once, for a company you're actually pursuing, then close the tab.
And it's not for you if the question is whether to hold the stock. Different question, different evidence, not mine to answer.
Which leaves the thing I genuinely cannot tell you: when a company says the shape of its organization no longer fits the work, is it describing a permanent reduction in how many engineers software needs — or the first draft of a structure that quietly re-hires the same roles under new titles in eighteen months, at which point the only people who lost anything are the 630 who were standing there when the sentence got written?
