On March 2 I opened a spreadsheet and started counting. Every posting within forty miles of Seattle that I could plausibly apply to — software engineer, data engineer, platform, SRE, the adjacent titles — logged by requisition ID, employer, post date, and the date it disappeared. I started the week the newest round of Amazon layoffs was confirmed, the one where the company declined to attach a number to it. I wanted to know what the market looked like from the inside of a spreadsheet instead of from a headline.
Sixty-one days later I had 2,431 rows.
After I deduplicated by requisition ID, removed the same client role listed by four different staffing agencies, dropped the evergreen postings that had been open since the previous fall, and kept only the ones that were net-new and still live after 45 days, I had 213.
Two thousand four hundred thirty-one postings. Two hundred thirteen jobs. For a metro area where the layoff notices alone run into five figures.
No affiliate links in this piece. Nothing here is a product, and I am not selling you a course about resilience.
The verdict, in one sentence: the regional job market did not shrink by the number of people who were cut — it shrank by more than that, because the same decisions that ended those jobs also ended the hiring that would have absorbed them.
What 2,431 postings actually contained
Here is the breakdown, because the breakdown is the whole argument.
Of 2,431 raw rows, 1,327 were duplicates of a posting I had already logged — the same requisition surfacing again on a different board, or refreshed by the employer to move it up the sort. That is not a conspiracy. Recruiting teams refresh postings because stale listings sink. But if you are counting opportunities and you count each refresh, you will believe there are four times as many jobs as there are.
That left 1,104 unique requisitions. From those I removed 288 that had been posted before my window opened and were simply still sitting there. I removed 141 listed by staffing firms where the same title, same location, and same three bullet points appeared under three different agency names. I removed the ones outside my radius that had been tagged Seattle because the company's headquarters is here.
What survived: 213 distinct, net-new roles at employers I could name. Expedia. Zillow. T-Mobile in Bellevue. Costco out in Issaquah, which is quietly one of the most stable engineering employers in the state and which almost nobody in this town treats as a real option. PACCAR. Alaska Airlines. Fred Hutch. Nordstrom. A handful of Series B companies in Fremont with eleven employees and a hiring bar calibrated for someone who has already done the exact thing twice.
I qualified for 96 of the 213. I applied to all 96. I got four responses and one phone screen.
That ratio is not a story about my résumé. I have shipped production systems that handle real traffic. It is a story about 96 people applying being the optimistic estimate — the actual number applying to each of those postings is in the hundreds, and a meaningful share of them were, until recently, employed at the company whose logo is on half the buildings between Denny and Mercer.
The word "role"
Read the announcements closely and you'll notice nobody is ever laid off. Roles are eliminated. Priorities are sharpened. Organizations are reshaped around the thing the company has decided is the future — which, in this cycle, is uniformly described as artificial intelligence, including in the rounds that hit the AI organizations themselves.
That last part is the tell. If the cuts were a straightforward reallocation toward AI, the AI teams would be the ones growing. When the reductions land inside the division that is supposed to be the destination, the reallocation framing is doing less work than it appears to.
I am not accusing anyone of lying. Companies genuinely do reorganize, and the people writing those notes are often two levels away from the decision. But you should read the language as a message to shareholders that happens to be legible to employees, rather than as an explanation addressed to you. "Role eliminations" tells you the headcount left. It does not tell you whether the team is backfilling in Bangalore, whether the req you're staring at was posted before the freeze and never pulled, or whether the hiring manager still has budget.
Those three questions are the ones that decide whether your application goes anywhere. None of them are answered in the announcement.
Why this lands differently here
In most cities, a single company's cuts are a business story. Here they are a regional event. The concentration cuts both ways — it built a decade of salaries that priced out everyone else, and it means a reorg memo written in one building changes the arithmetic for people who have never written a line of code.
I eat lunch near South Lake Union maybe twice a month. In 2022 the counter I go to had a line out the door and down the block at 12:15. In April I walked in at 12:20 and was third. The owner told me they had cut a shift. I am not going to dress that up as a statistic — it is one lunch counter and one conversation. But every dental practice, physical therapist, dog walker, and mortgage broker on the Eastside built a business on the assumption that a certain number of people with a certain income would keep showing up, and that assumption is being revised without anybody announcing it.
The office occupancy numbers get quoted constantly and they undercount the effect, because a company can keep its lease and still empty the floor.
The one thing I'd do with your next hour
Washington's Employment Security Department publishes every WARN notice the state receives. Federal law requires employers over a certain size to give 60 days' notice of a mass layoff, and the resulting list is public, searchable, and updated continuously. It contains the employer, the site address, the number of workers affected, and the separation date.
Most people read it as a news feed. It is more useful as an instrument, in three ways.
Cross companies off. If a company filed a notice within the last four months, the postings still live on its careers page are, more often than not, either pipeline reqs or roles that were approved before the decision and never pulled. I stopped applying to those and my response rate went up, not because the remaining companies liked me more, but because I stopped spending Tuesday nights on requisitions that no longer had a budget behind them.
Read the separation dates forward. A notice filed in March with a May separation date means several hundred people in your exact title hit the market in May. If you are applying in April to companies that historically hire from that employer, you are ahead of a wave you can see coming. That is not a trick and it is not fair — it is the one piece of timing information you can get for free, and people who were born into this pipeline get equivalent information from a text message.
Find who survived. When a site reduces by 400 and stays open, some teams there kept their headcount and now have to justify it. Those managers are the rare people hiring with urgency. The WARN list tells you which addresses to look at; a careful pass through LinkedIn tells you which orgs inside them still have open reqs posted after the separation date. Those postings are real in a way the others are not.
One hour. It will not get you hired. It will stop you from spending forty hours applying into rooms with nobody in them.
Who this is for, and who it isn't
This is for you if you are in the Puget Sound region, in or adjacent to tech, and your applications have stopped producing responses that used to be automatic. It is also for you if you own something that depends on this workforce and you want to know whether the quiet is temporary.
It is not for you if you are already in a process with a company that is actively growing. Do not let a market-level number talk you out of a live conversation. Market averages describe rooms, not people, and you are already in the room.
Back to 213
When I finished the count, my first reaction was that 213 explained everything about the last year and I should feel better. I didn't feel better. But the number is not a verdict on you. It is a measurement of the room you have been applying into, and it means the four rejections you got last month were four rejections out of a pool of hundreds, not evidence about your worth.
Two hundred thirteen jobs is a brutal number. It is also a finite one, which means it can be worked — and that is different from the thing you've been told, which is that you should try harder at a market with no edges.
