“We don’t want to stick to a company for 20 years like you millennials and then cry how it was your family and how it threw you out without notice.”A Gen Z friend told me this in the wake of the Oracle layoffs, and it landed emotionally. The remark was not diplomatic. It was not meant to be.On March 31, thousands of Oracle employees woke up to termination emails sent at 6 am. Their VPN access had already been revoked. Slack was dead. A decades-long employee told The Register that the message amounted to: “Thank you. Go [expletive] yourself.” Oracle’s USD 2.1 billion restructuring budget for fiscal year 2026, disclosed in an SEC filing, funds this purge. TD Cowen estimates 20,000 to 30,000 positions will be eliminated, roughly 18% of the company’s global workforce.Oracle is not an outlier. It is the latest entry in a pattern that has persisted for half a decade.The numbersSince 2020, the technology sector has shed workers at a pace that no longer fits the language of correction or downturn.Challenger, Gray & Christmas recorded 1.2 million job cuts across all US industries in 2025, the highest annual total since the pandemic year of 2020. Of those, about 55,000 were explicitly attributed to AI, a figure the firm has tracked only since 2023. Technology led private-sector cuts with over 154,000 announced layoffs in 2025 alone.Sources: Layoffs.fyi, Crunchbase News Tech Layoffs Tracker, Computerworld, Challenger, Gray & Christmas (Dec 2025), CNBC, TrueUp Layoffs Tracker, company press releases and SEC filings (US). Numbers are approximations, trackers use different methodologies and update continuously.The cumulative toll since 2020 exceeds 600,000 tech workers globally, per Layoffs.fyi. Some trackers put the number higher. The point remains: this is structural, not cyclical.What the pattern does to peopleThe public conversation still runs on a familiar emotional script. Shock, anger, a carefully worded LinkedIn post. Then drift. Workers describe entire teams vanishing between meetings, access revoked before a conversation could happen. What stays with people is not only financial precarity but something closer to a ruptured identity. Many had staked their sense of self on institutional belonging, only to learn how thin that belonging was.For millennials, this cuts with particular force. They were raised on an implicit bargain: work hard, stay loyal, and the institution will reciprocate. The language of “work family” was not decorative. It was structural, repeated in onboarding decks and CEO town halls, internalised over years. It made sacrifice feel like a two-way street.The past five years exposed that street as a dead end.Also read: Explainer | What do the Labour Codes Mean for the Indian Worker?When I asked a group of Gen Z’s in their early twenties what they would assume if a CEO called them “part of the family” in their first week, the answers were telling. One said it was a red flag for overwork. Another said they would delete their LinkedIn profile. A 23-year-old laughed and said, “They will name their next child after me.” The joke works because it refuses to take the premise seriously. The company says family; Gen Z hears performance.Companies do not act like families under pressure. They act like systems optimising for survival. Layoffs track strategy, cost structures, and the anticipated displacement of human labour by AI-driven workflows. Individual performance rarely figures in.The generational fractureGen Z often gets labelled as disengaged or entitled. In practice, they operate from a different premise: work is a site of exchange, not belonging. They are less inclined to stay late without compensation, less interested in binding their identities to an employer, and less troubled by switching roles.I put a simpler question to the same group: what separates dedication from delusion about one’s employer? One answered in two words: “Being employed.” Another was more economical: “Nothing.”There is no mourning for a lost model in these answers. No expectation that work should provide existential meaning. The boundary between professional and personal life is treated as protection, not deficiency.Also read: What AI Means for Your CareerThis is easy to misread as laziness or shallow ambition. That reading assumes the old bargain still holds. When layoffs recur at this scale, year after year, across companies and borders, the premise of long-term stability collapses. Loyalty does not get rewarded. Emotional detachment is less a refusal to work and more a refusal to overinvest in something that has proven unreliable. When asked how do you perceive work in these times, a Gen Z friend commented, “Work is to earn money,” and then went on to add “We already have family and friends to spend that money on. You lived for work. We work to live,” critiquing the millennial notion of “work family”.What gets lost, what gets savedA transactional relationship with work has costs. Mentorship thins out. Institutional memory erodes. The absence of long-term attachment weakens the bonds that make workplaces generative.But it also limits a specific kind of heartbreak. You cannot be betrayed by an institution you never imagined as family.The phrase “work family” now carries a dissonance that is hard to ignore. It promises intimacy while operating within a structure that subordinates people to profitability. For a generation that watched thousands lose their livelihoods despite years of commitment, the promise rings hollow.What replaces it is calibration. Work becomes one element of life. Boundaries become fixed. Loyalty gets tied to compensation and respect.Millennials and Gen Z are often set up as opposites here. They are better understood as two points within the same transition. One was encouraged to believe in institutional stability. The other grew up watching those institutions restructure, automate, and shed labour with escalating frequency.The uncomfortable question is not whether Gen Z’s detachment is justified. It is whether the alternative ever was.Bupinder Singh Bali is an educator and writer based out of Kashmir. He is currently a fellow at Young India Fellowship, Ashoka University.