Tech Companies Are Cutting Whole Offices Instead of Percentages

TikTok cut 75 jobs in the Seattle area this week, a number small enough to scroll past. The cuts were concentrated in e-commerce teams at the company's Bellevue site, and they came two weeks after TikTok shut its Nashville office outright and eliminated 250 positions there. Two locations and two business lines, with one decision behind both.

More of the layoffs we follow look like that now. Worldwide tech layoffs have already passed last year's full-year total with four months still left on the calendar, and a growing share of that total arrives as news about a specific address instead of a memo to all staff. If you're trying to judge your own risk, the office directory may tell you more than the org chart.

The percentage cut hasn't gone away

The pandemic-era layoff was a uniform haircut announced in one blog post, and that format is still around. Robinhood cut 10 percent in June. Patreon cut 20 percent in July. Lucid's new CEO cut 18 percent of staff, which the company framed as an effort to simplify itself. Those are easy to compare and easy to write about.

The site-by-site version is harder to see because it never produces one big number. You get a stream of local stories instead: 250 in Nashville, 75 in Bellevue, another round in Seattle, each pinned to a particular team or a lease that's ending. Added up, they reach the same volume as a headline percentage cut, but they arrive without the internal shock of a company-wide announcement, and without drawing the same coverage or the same scrutiny of severance.

For employers, that's a feature. Closing a site is a clean accounting event that removes the real estate cost, the local employment obligations and a business line in one move. For workers it removes something else, which is the assumption that good performance and closeness to revenue decide who stays.

Satellite offices opened after 2020 go first

Most of the offices closing now were opened between 2020 and 2023, when companies expanded into second-tier metros for cheaper talent and lower rent. Those sites rarely housed core platform engineering. They held the functions that grew fastest during the expansion, such as e-commerce operations, trust and safety, creator support, sales engineering and regional marketing. When spending priorities shift, those are the first functions to get relabeled optional.

You can see where the money goes instead. AI now accounts for 57 percent of Bay Area tech job postings. The same company can close a Nashville office and open AI infrastructure roles in a main hub in the same quarter, and both moves come out of the same budget decision.

Remote work plays a part too. A spread-out footprint made sense when remote work looked permanent, and new research keeps challenging the productivity case behind return-to-office mandates. But cost discipline is driving footprint decisions far more than evidence is. Fewer buildings make the next round of cuts simpler to carry out and easier to justify to a board.

Our rough ranking of exposure by site, from most to least:

• Highest: satellite sites opened after 2020 that have no core engineering function
• High: teams supporting a business line the company has stopped funding, like commerce, creator monetization or hardware side projects
• Moderate: regional sales and support hubs that duplicate coverage in another time zone
• Lower: sites that host infrastructure, security, or model and data platform work that can't be moved quickly

A closed office is a portfolio decision

TikTok's Bellevue cuts hit e-commerce specifically, and that's the tell. This is a company deciding to stop funding a side bet that was supposed to diversify revenue and didn't do it fast enough. Lucid's language about simplifying the company is the same instinct applied to a whole company.

Keep that in mind when you read the AI explanations attached to a lot of these announcements. Monday.com joined a list of more than 20 companies that have publicly tied layoffs to AI, and the reaction to Robinhood's note on its 10 percent cut showed that investors and employees no longer take that explanation at face value. Automation really is changing how junior work gets done. A shuttered office in Nashville is still a capital allocation decision first and an automation story second.

It also means an internal transfer protects you less than it used to. When a whole line of business gets pruned, the neighboring teams in the same product area usually go in the same cycle. Moving one desk over inside a bet the company has given up on buys you months.

Visa holders and small-market workers carry more of the risk

The first group is visa holders, who have a short window to find new sponsorship after a termination. Reporting this month suggests layoff fears are already pushing some of them out of Big Tech voluntarily, toward smaller employers or out of the country before a cut starts the clock for them. When a whole site closes, there's no internal fallback at all.

The second is anyone in a thin local job market. Lose a job in Bellevue and you're competing in a metro with hundreds of tech employers, even in a bad stretch. Lose one in Nashville after the only major tech office in town has closed and you're in a much harder spot. Smaller firms say the layoff wave has made hiring easier, and that's real relief, but the capacity to absorb people is spread unevenly, along the same geography that produced the satellite offices in the first place.

One account this week came from a software engineer with 13 years at his company and a high salary, who learned he'd been let go through an automated email. The process has become routine enough to automate, and neither his tenure nor his pay gave him any warning.

If you work outside headquarters, check your exposure on two questions. Does your site do anything the company considers structurally necessary? Is your business line being funded or harvested? If both answers are no, we'd treat the job as a fixed-term contract with an unknown end date.

That doesn't call for panic. It calls for building options while you still have a paycheck. Get to know someone at a smaller local employer every quarter, since that's where displaced people are being hired. If you're on a visa, know your grace period exactly and have three sponsor-capable employers identified before you need them. Get any remote flexibility in writing now, so a closure becomes a relocation conversation instead of an automatic termination. And keep a running log of shipped work with numbers, because a closure won't give you time to rebuild a portfolio.

Then watch the boring public stuff: lease renewals and sublease listings, hiring freezes that apply to your location but not to the hub cities, a site leader who gets reassigned, and decision meetings that drift into another time zone. Each of those tends to show up months before the closure announcement does.