Your Company Didn't Cut You Because of AI. They Cut You Because Money Got Expensive.

You've heard the story. The company is "right-sizing." They're "investing in the future." AI is transforming the business. Your role, unfortunately, no longer fits the direction they're heading.

It's a clean narrative. It gives the CFO something to say on the earnings call. It gives you something to tell people at dinner. But it's not the real story.

The real story is a lot less cinematic. It's about interest rates.

The Decade of Free Money

From 2008 through most of 2022, the Federal Reserve held interest rates near zero. That era had a name: ZIRP, zero interest rate policy. For fourteen years, borrowing money was essentially free. Companies used that window to hire aggressively, expand headcount, build teams for growth that may never have arrived.

Then in 2022, inflation forced the Fed's hand. Rates climbed from near zero to 5.25-5.5% by mid-2023, the fastest tightening cycle in decades. Overnight, the cost of capital exploded. Companies that had been running on cheap debt suddenly had to service that debt at real rates.

They needed to cut costs. Fast.

Who Pays When Capital Gets Expensive

Here's the part that doesn't make the press release. Goldman Sachs research published in August 2023 found that for each additional dollar of interest expense, firms lower their labor costs by 20 cents (Markets Insider, Aug 2023). That's double the cut they take from equipment and other capital expenditures.

Workers absorb twice the hit of machines when money gets expensive. That's not a bug in the system. That's how the system was designed. Headcount is fast to adjust, socially acceptable to cut with the right framing, and shows up immediately on the balance sheet. Equipment has depreciation schedules. Contracts have penalties. Employees have two weeks notice.

And S&P Global tracked a $2.3 trillion corporate debt maturity wall between 2024 and 2026. Companies that borrowed cheap during the ZIRP years are now refinancing at rates four or five times higher. That pressure doesn't go away. It compounds.

The Math Doesn't Support the AI Story

Challenger Gray & Christmas tracked 1,206,374 job cuts in 2025, up 58% from 2024 and the highest fourth quarter volume since 2008. That's not a blip. That's a structural reset.

Now look at the AI number. Since Challenger Gray started tracking AI-attributed cuts in 2023, companies have cited AI as the reason for 54,836 total layoffs. Out of 1.2 million cuts in 2025 alone, AI accounts for roughly 4.5%. The math does not support the narrative.

The story you've been handed, that a robot took your job, is more comfortable for everyone involved than the actual story, which is that your employer borrowed money at zero percent, used it to build a team, and is now paying 5.5% to carry that debt. You were the variable they could adjust the fastest.

The Hidden Problem Nobody Talks About

Even if you move quickly after a layoff, you're running into a wall. Challenger Gray also reported that hiring plans are at their lowest level since 2010. Companies aren't just cutting. They're frozen. The people who lost jobs in 2024 and 2025 aren't landing somewhere else at the same rate. The floor didn't just shift under them. For a lot of people, it disappeared.

This isn't about your performance review. It's not about your skills gap or your attitude or whether you were a team player. You were a line item in someone else's balance sheet calculation, and when the interest rate environment changed, the math stopped working in your favor.

What You Do With That

Once you see the actual mechanism, the obvious question is: what do you do about it?

The conventional answer is to get better skills, update your resume, network harder. Those things aren't wrong. But they don't address the underlying problem, which is that you're still inside a structure where someone else's cost of capital determines your financial security.

The answer that actually addresses the problem is to build something where you control the math. Not a side hustle you work on weekends. A system. Something that generates income based on value delivered, not based on whether a CFO decides this quarter that headcount needs to come down.

That's harder to build than a LinkedIn profile. It takes longer. But it's the only structure that doesn't leave you exposed to decisions made in boardrooms you'll never see.

Where to Go From Here

Rob is building this in public at gohawkwork.com. The premise is simple: when your employer's balance sheet makes you disposable, you need income that doesn't depend on their balance sheet. Hawkwork is the work in progress on what that actually looks like.

The layoff wasn't personal. But what you build next can be.