Five People Left. One Product to Ship. The Day After the Layoffs.

I remember logging in the morning after the layoffs. The team that was left: me on QA, a UI designer, a lead developer, and two frontend developers. Five people where there used to be a lot more. The job in front of us was simple enough. Finish the bug fixes. Ship version 1. And Keep moving. Nobody really talked about what had just happened. But everyone was thinking the same thing. "Am I next?" The energy in those first standups was different. Quieter. People were showing up but you could feel the weight behind it. Management eventually addressed it directly. If the product doesn't shut down entirely, everyone who's still here stays. Not a glamorous thing to say, but it was honest. And it helped. Took a couple of weeks before things started feeling like work again instead of aftermath. What I didn't expect was how it felt to lose the PM who had originally brought me in. The one who gave me the lead QA role in the first place. That hit differently. Not just because of the extra workloa