Layoff years compress organizations. Scopes overlap. Lanes that were clear during a growth year start running into each other. Most of the resulting friction works itself out. Some of it doesn't.
In 2026, 138,000 tech workers have already been let go across 324 companies. Meta cut 8,000 in a memo. Oracle dropped somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 in a 6 a.m. email. Microsoft launched the first voluntary retirement program in its 51-year history. Block, Coinbase, Cisco, and a long list of others all cited AI as the reason their teams could be smaller and flatter.
A market this tight raises the stakes on every working relationship. In a year where leadership is openly asking who can do whose job, that overlap becomes a resource question. When one party works to resolve it collaboratively and the other works to win it, the cost lands on whoever is doing the accommodating.
The thing to know up front is that the asymmetry doesn't close by trying harder on your side. The other party isn't trying to find common ground. They're building a case. Engaging more just gives them better material.
What works is borrowing from infrastructure.
In systems work, there's a concept called blast radius. It describes how far damage spreads when something breaks. A blast radius of one means a single service goes down. A blast radius of everything means a misconfigured deploy takes the whole company offline. The job is to design things so failures stay small.
The same logic applies when someone in your org has set you in their sights. You aren't trying to repair anything. You're trying to keep the damage local.
Shrink the surface
In security, attack surface is the sum of every place a system can be reached, queried, or pulled into. The first move is to make yours smaller without making the change obvious.
This can mean cutting things you used to think were good for your career. Impromptu coffees. The drop-in DM that turns into a thirty-minute therapy session about middle management. Pulled-aside-after-the-meeting conversations. None of it is bad on its own. All of it becomes edited and reframed, when it's convenient.
Early drafts stop going into shared docs. Personal stuff stops showing up in team channels. The hobbies, the weekend plans, the half-joke about a manager. All of it is data, and the safer working assumption is that anything shared at work could end up in front of someone you haven't met.
Make everything written
This single move does more work than anything else on this list.
Slack threads. Doc comments. Ticket updates. Email when it has to be. Anything but the hallway conversation and the unscheduled call.
The first reason is the obvious one. If things escalate later, you'll need a record, and the record will not exist if you talked it out.
The second reason matters more. A lot of what gets said in person doesn't survive being typed. You can almost feel the person editing themselves once they know they're on the record.
When someone pushes for a quick call or wants to grab you for five minutes, redirect politely. "Happy to look once you send it over." "Can you drop the question in the ticket so I can give it real attention." Then go back to whatever you were doing.
This isn't being difficult. It's insisting on the baseline professional communication you'd ask of any other cross-team colleague. The fact that this one finds it inconvenient is sort of the point.
Side effect worth knowing: if they refuse to put anything in writing, that's information too. Anyone who only wants to engage off the record is telling you what kind of conversation they want to be having.
Stop arguing with the framing
Problematic colleagues like to offer you stories about who you are. Sometimes flattering, sometimes critical. The thread is that the framing always shrinks your scope, or anchors your work to theirs.
You don't have to argue with it. You also don't have to accept it. A useful script for these moments: acknowledge what you heard, restate what you're actually doing, move on.
"Got it. I'm still planning to ship the launch post next week. Happy to coordinate if there's overlap."
That's the whole thing. No defense. No correction. No explanation of why their version of your role is wrong. The argument isn't winnable anyway. They aren't actually offering a view of your job. They're offering a smaller version of you, and the only correct response to a smaller version of you is to keep being the size you are.
Protect what compounds
The real cost of one of these dynamics isn't the conflicts. It's what they do to your attention. The counter is to protect the parts of your work that compound.
This matters more right now than it did two years ago. Coinbase cut roughly 14 percent of its workforce and called the resulting team "lean, fast, and AI-native." Block cut nearly half its staff, and Jack Dorsey told the company that smaller, flatter teams were the future. When that's the prevailing logic across the industry, the people who survive are the ones whose work has obvious, legible, compounding leverage. You want to be expensive to lose, and you want the case for keeping you to be visible without anyone having to fight for you in a room you aren't in.
A useful weekly check: would the next thing you're shipping still matter if this person weren't in your org. When the answer is no for too many weeks in a row, the dynamic has captured you, and it's time to reset.
Keep the file
Somewhere on a personal machine, not anything synced to work, keep a plain text document with dates, what happened, who was there, what was said or written. No commentary. No theories. Just the receipts.
You'll likely never need it. You'll be glad you have it.
The file isn't a place for venting. Venting goes to friends, a therapist, or a journal you'd be okay losing. The file's job is to make a clear factual case if it ever has to be made to a manager or HR. Trying to reconstruct six months of incidents from memory while stressed and being asked pointed questions is a particular kind of awful. The file is insurance against that. It costs maybe four minutes a week.
Escalate carefully or not at all
Most of these dynamics don't need escalation. They burn out. The colleague gets bored, the team reorgs, or more likely, the company has bigger problems. The default move is to outlast the thing, not confront it.
The threshold for taking it up the chain is concrete harm. Credit getting taken in a way that hits a perf review. Material misrepresentation of you to leadership. Sustained interference with shipping.
When escalation does happen, lead with impact on the work. "This is blocking shipping X by Y" gets traction. "This is making me uncomfortable" doesn't, even though both can be true at the same time. Managers will move on the first. Many will quietly let the second die.
What to actually do this week
Three things, if any of this is hitting.
Pull the receipts on the last two months. Even if nothing is currently on fire. Especially if nothing is currently on fire, because the moment you'll wish you had this information is the moment you're least able to gather it.
Close one informal channel. The unscheduled call. The "can I grab you" Slack. The hallway side-meeting. Just one. The point isn't to wall off the relationship in a day. The point is to start changing the geometry.
And look at what's shipping next. If it's a thing decided in reaction to something happening internally, swap it. Ship the thing that grows your own visibility instead. The colleague has a finite amount of energy for this. So do you. Spend yours on the work that compounds.
There's no clean ending here. The breakthrough conversation doesn't happen. The colleague doesn't suddenly see what you've been seeing. What happens, with your attention back on the work, is that the work gets better. Doors open in rooms no one inside your team controls. Turns out, it was always running on access to you. By the time you notice it's gone quiet, you're somewhere else entirely.
That's the win.
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