A Second Layoff at Uber: The Reality of the Boomerang Employee

The decision to return to Uber felt like a calculated risk. After an initial layoff in 2023, Kori X spent time managing a retail shop before the business shuttered, prompting a return to the tech giant. Within four months of joining the GenAI evaluations team, the cycle repeated. There were no warning signs; she was actively planning company holiday events and working from the office when the notification arrived. By 5 p.m. local time, her internal system access was permanently revoked.

While Kori X will receive 21 weeks of severance and two months of garden leave, the emotional toll of a second departure remains sharp. She rejects the corporate narrative that layoffs are merely a correction of management layers, suggesting instead that the company is aggressively pivoting to AI to maximize margins with fewer staff. Now back on a difficult job market, she is questioning whether the corporate ladder is worth the instability, expressing a preference for smaller, non-corporate environments where institutional knowledge is valued rather than discarded.