An Asheville resident on life after Helene

👋 We’ve returned with the Medium Newsletter
Issue #187: analyzing tech layoffs and observing without absorbing
By Harris Sockel

“I awoke about 2 a.m. the night of the storm to the sound of small explosions in the street,” writes Asheville resident Doug Brown in a story about life after Hurricane Helene. “My room kept lighting up in odd colors. I looked out the window and saw sparks flying in all directions in iridescent blues and greens. It would have been beautiful if it were not terrifying.”

Almost 100 people are missing in North Carolina. Entire towns, like Marshall, were underwater. Brown and his neighbors still don’t have running water, and when the water does come back they’ll need to boil it. For now, they’re lining up with buckets every few days:

I wash myself with a washcloth and splash rubbing alcohol in my armpits, and dream of the day when I can take a shower again. Asheville is kind of a hippie town, but as my friend Molly puts it, “We’re all hippies now.”

Brown’s story is more human than anything I’ve read about this disaster so far. It makes me feel like I’m there. It’s also an inspiring tribute to humans’ ability to simply keep going when faced with ambiguity, change, and hardship. “Our grief is real,” Brown writes. “But so is our strength.”

One more story: analyzing tech layoffs

Tech’s been in the midst of a recession since the pandemic: According to layoffs.fyi, 470 tech companies laid off 141,000 employees in 2024. Those numbers are a bit better than what we saw in 2023 (264K layoffs total), so maybe we’re heading toward brighter days… but it’s unclear.

Analytics and experimentation director Bhavik Patel analyzed a dataset of 2,800 layoffs and tried to — as objectively as possible — figure out which roles have been impacted most. He found that product and design roles are more likely to be impacted than roles in engineering or data analytics:

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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

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