I keep getting laid off in tech. Is it me, the industry, or am I missing something obvious?
What the lenses had in common. Sharpest when a pattern names a tension you hadn’t fully named yourself — weakest when it summarises something you already know.
Steelman and Reflection Check converge on the diagnostic move you've probably been resisting: write both the strongest case for 'industry' and the strongest case for 'me'. Show both to someone honest. The half you can't write easily is the half you've been hiding from. The full answer is almost always partial in both directions.
From Steelman the Other Side The Reflection Check
Blockbuster and Titanic both point at structural cause, not single-event cause: the position you keep landing in may be one the market is quietly retiring, and a chain of safer-than-alternative career moves may have narrowed your range. The next move likely needs to be sideways or upward into a different role-shape — not the same one at the next company.
From Blockbuster Passes on Netflix The Titanic
The Oblique Strategies lens reframes helplessness as setup. If you were writing the story, three layoffs would be there to make a fourth chapter possible that the comfortable version wouldn't have. The question to live with is what chapter four needs — not whose fault chapters one-through-three were.
From Eno & Schmidt's Oblique Strategies
Often the sharpest provocation lives inside a single lens, not in the synthesis above. Skim them; one tends to land harder than the others.
Build their argument stronger than they did, then answer that.
Read this lensBefore deciding if it's you, the industry, or both, run the steelman in both directions. What's the strongest case that it's the industry? (Macro layoffs, post-ZIRP, AI compression of certain roles, two-decade cohort glut.) What's the strongest case that it's you? (Same role-shape in three companies, specific feedback you keep dismissing, the way you talk about ex-employers.) Most people only run one of the two steelmans and end up with a half-truth. The full diagnostic requires running both.
Show both steelmans to one person who knows you well and isn't on payroll to be nice. Ask them which one they think contains more of the truth. The answer will likely surprise you only in degree, not in direction.
The opposite of a straw man: before rebutting, you state your opponent's case so well they'd say 'yes, that's exactly what I mean.' Rapoport's first rule of constructive disagreement.
The principle: You haven't earned your counterargument until you can pass the other side's ideological Turing test. Most conflicts run on each side fighting a cartoon of the other.
Declining the future while it's still cheap to buy.
Read this lensBlockbuster was offered Netflix for $50M in 2000 and laughed. The signal was visible — DVDs by post were obviously coming for stores — but Blockbuster's strength (1000s of retail leases) made them blind to the threat their strength was creating. If you keep getting laid off from the same role-shape, the thing you're skilled at may be the role-shape that's becoming a liability. Your competence is mapped onto a position that the market is quietly retiring.
Look at the job postings from your last three employers, today. Which roles are they hiring for now? Which have they stopped hiring for? The answer is publicly available data about the shape of the work shifting underneath you.
In 2000 Reed Hastings flew to Dallas and offered to sell Netflix to Blockbuster for $50 million. Blockbuster's CEO laughed him out of the room. Why would the dominant video-rental empire pay for an unprofitable mail-order DVD startup? A decade later Blockbuster was bankrupt and Netflix was worth billions.
The principle: When a small threat asks to be bought, it is offering a much better price than it will charge later. Dismissing it from a position of strength is exactly the position from which the dismissal is most dangerous — because you can afford the deal and you assume you don't need it.
You haven't earned your rebuttal until they agree you understood them.
Read this lensThe reflection check: separate signal from noise by looking for the pattern that persists across contexts. Three layoffs at three different companies looks like industry. But: same level of seniority? Same kind of work? Same kind of team culture you joined? The pattern that survives across the variation is the one that points at you (or at your sector of the industry). The pattern that varies tells you about luck or market timing.
Open the final-review document or last-1:1-notes from each of the three jobs (or your memory of them). Write down the three to five overlapping phrases. The overlap is the signal you've been minimising.
The Rogerian / active-listening discipline: repeat the other side's position back in your own words until they confirm 'yes, that's right' — then you may respond.
The principle: Most people in conflict aren't arguing, they're waiting to be understood. The reflection check removes the thing they're actually fighting for — being heard — and the heat usually drops with it.
When confidence becomes a design assumption.
Read this lensThe Titanic's failure wasn't the iceberg — it was a stack of small decisions assumed to be safe: too few lifeboats, watertight bulkheads that didn't go high enough, a captain incentivised to keep speed for arrival schedule. The layoff pattern is rarely caused by one big mistake; it's a series of small choices each rational in isolation. Choosing the higher-paying offer over the more learning-rich one. Avoiding the role that scared you. Staying with the boss who liked you instead of the one who would have stretched you. Each safe step accumulating.
List your last five career choices. Mark each as 'safer than the alternative' or 'riskier than the alternative.' Patterns will appear that the day-to-day didn't reveal. The next move likely needs to break the pattern, not optimise within it.
The Titanic was advertised as practically unsinkable. The confidence shaped material choices: lifeboats for half the passengers, watertight bulkheads only as tall as the engineers thought they needed to be, a sea-trial of less than a day, an ice-warning-laden North Atlantic at full cruising speed. The iceberg was the trigger; the assumption was the cause.
The principle: When an organisation believes the worst case cannot happen, it stops preparing for the worst case. The assumption becomes a design parameter — it shapes the lifeboat count, the redundancy, the schedule, the speed. The failure that follows is shaped by every decision the assumption authorised.
When stuck, draw a card. Let an unrelated instruction redirect you.
Read this lensBrian Eno's deck of cards is for when the direct approach is stuck. The question 'is it me or the industry?' is exactly the kind of frame that won't unstick because both answers preserve helplessness. Oblique reframe: imagine the layoffs are happening to your character in a novel. The author wouldn't have written three layoffs in a row unless they were preparing the character for something specific. What's the chapter that's about to start, that needed this much disruption to make possible?
Write one paragraph as if your career were a novel and the chapter ending now was the third chapter. What's chapter four about? Don't think about realism. The chapter title will probably surprise you.
Eno and Schmidt's deck of cards — 'Honour thy error as a hidden intention', 'Use an old idea', 'Discard an axiom', 'What would your closest friend do?' — was made for studio sessions where the obvious next move had been worn out. The trick is the cards are deliberately oblique: not domain-specific advice, but provocations from far enough sideways that the mind has to twist to apply them. The twist is where the new direction comes from.
The principle: When you're inside a problem, your next thought is constrained by the previous thought. A random external instruction breaks that chain. The advice doesn't need to be 'right' — it needs to be other.
Lenses ranked relevant but kept off the exploration — the runner-up reading. Each links to the lens itself, not an applied reading of your question.
Invent your own killer and hide it in a drawer.
Destruction that preserved everything perfectly.
Make it safe to stop the line, or the fault ships anyway.
Right conviction, wrong math, an accidental world.
The decline so slow no one alive could name the day.
Suppress it and you'll teach the world its name.
Intelligence with no center, in every arm.
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