I cut my teeth in events.
Big ones. Multi-million dollar productions for name brand clients. The kind where everything had to be perfect and the week hit 70 hours easily. Clients were thrilled. The work was genuinely excellent. I knew it, my team knew it, the clients knew it.
I never built a portfolio. I lost the photos. Lost the moment to capture the quotes while they were still warm.
When I moved into marketing I told myself I was smarter this time. I saved stats. I bookmarked links to sites I had helped build. I kept receipts.
Except the pages got sunsetted. The brands got revamped. The tools changed. The Slacks went dark. And the proof, again, stayed behind.
What I still have is the trust of the people who were in the room with me.
The colleagues who pick up the phone. The clients and partners who remember. That network carried me through every transition, every new role, every leap. I moved through recommendation and I know, in hindsight, how lucky that made me.
But luck is not a system. And the world that made that luck possible is changing faster than most people realize.
The Numbers Tell the Story
Tech layoffs have not been a blip. They have been a wave, and it keeps building.
Nearly 246,000 tech workers were laid off in 2025 alone, more than double the number just two years prior, with AI directly responsible for 55,000 of those losses.*
In 2026 the pace has accelerated. We are now at 843 people per day.**
And CEOs aren’t shying away from saying the reason. Block’s Jack Dorsey eliminated 40% of his workforce in February 2026, writing to shareholders that “a significantly smaller team, using the tools we’re building, can do more and do it better.” The market supported his decision. Stock jumped 20%.
These are not pandemic corrections anymore. This is structural. Companies are not over-hiring and trimming back. They are redesigning around AI and cutting the roles that no longer fit the new shape. Senior roles. Specialized roles. The kind held by people who have spent a decade doing excellent, compounding work and never once thought they would need to explain it from scratch. No one is safe.
Now they are thinking about the future of their careers. Will their role exist? Their company? Their industry? And with all that will they be able to prove they can do the job?
And they are discovering, the hard way, the same thing I learned quietly over a decade of moving between roles.
The proof is gone.
Proof Depreciates. Fast.
Here is the thing nobody says out loud: if your proof does not live somewhere, it is not just sitting still. It is actively losing value.
Memories fade. The manager who championed your biggest launch is three jobs removed and the details are getting fuzzy. Do you think you can call the client from March 2018 and ask them to recount the details of the email where they praised your work? The team that built something real together has scattered. The Slack channels are archived or deleted. The presentations are buried in drives no one opens, if they even still exist.
You cannot call that in retroactively. You cannot manufacture proof after the fact. And in an age where AI can generate everything else, the only thing that actually holds up is a real human being, with their own reputation on the line, saying: I was there, I saw what they did, it was real.
That signal depreciates the moment the witness walks out the door. Every day you wait, it gets harder to collect.
Now Prove It
Then comes the question nobody fully prepares for.
How do you prove what you have actually done? Not describe it. Prove it. In an age where anything can be generated in minutes, a well-written case study proves nothing. A polished portfolio proves nothing.
And the question nobody asks out loud but everyone wants answered: are you capable of excellent work in the future, in this world, under these conditions?
That requires a different kind of proof entirely. The kind that has to be built before you need it.
The Infrastructure That Does Not Exist
Your career is the most valuable asset you will ever build. You have spent years doing the work that compounds quietly in the small repetitive successes. That is career capital. And unlike financial capital, it has no ledger.
LinkedIn is self-reported. References are backward-looking and employer-controlled. Performance reviews disappear the moment you leave. There is no system designed to capture your work while the witnesses are still there. No way to make that proof portable so it moves when you do. No place where the real record of what you built compounds over time instead of evaporating the moment you change jobs.
There are people who have spent fifteen years doing the kind of work that quietly makes everything else possible. They deserve a record.
Proof was always the thing you assumed you could collect later. You were busy doing the work.
Later is now. And the witnesses are busy saving their own seats.
*Crunchbase News, Tech Layoffs Tracker
**InformationWeek, 2026 Tech Company Layoffs
***Layoffs.fyi, updated March 2026