Comcast laid off an undisclosed number of senior technologists from its TPX team

For the past year or so, every few weeks, it seems we at Technical.ly hear of another big tech company cutting staff. Sometimes the move is publicly announced; often, it’s not, and we find out from the sudden slew of LinkedIn posts or the sly Slack DM.

In the latter category: At the end of October, telecommunications giant Comcast laid off an undisclosed number of technical employees, including senior technologists who had been with the company for years. These roles appeared to be concentrated in the Technology Product and Experience (TPX) team, which develops products to improve customer experience.

A Comcast spokesperson confirmed to Technical.ly that the company had reduced headcount on its TPX team, but declined to share the number of impacted employees or speak on the record. The spokesperson said Comcast did provide salary and benefits continuation as part of a severance package to these former employees, and offered other resources such as connections to hiring teams in other parts of the company.

Marck Goldstein was a senior technical program manager who had worked for Comcast for five years before he was impacted by the October layoffs.

Goldstein told Technical.ly he was aware of about 20 roles impacted in project management and engineering leadership, though he’s not sure of the total number included in this round of cuts. Many of those roles were senior-level positions, he said, and he didn’t receive any notice ahead of time about the layoffs.

“The decisions were made higher up than my direct manager, who could not offer any additional reasons beyond ‘restructuring,’” Goldstein said via email. “At the time I heard about it, it was stated that there was really no room for negotiation on the fact, and it was not related to job performance.” (The company spokesperson declined to give a specific reason for the layoffs, and noted that Comcast regularly evaluates its staffing and team structure.)

Titles of those affected included service designer, senior product designer, senior user experience researcher and senior technical program manager, according to LinkedIn posts.

Goldstein said many of the affected employees were “very high performers and [had] been with the company for several years, with a long roadmap that we planned on building,” which made the layoffs especially surprising.

In LinkedIn posts and and in conversations with Technical.ly, other affected employees described multiple years working at the company, alluded to “budget cuts,” and said they would miss their teams.

To be sure, this round of layoffs seems to represent a very small percentage of Comcast’s sprawling workforce, including around 8,000 employees based at its Center City skyscrapers. But it is a reminder that, no matter how resilient we see tech careers, they are not unfailingly so, even for the most experienced technologists.

And for anyone experiencing a layoff, keep in mind: It may be helpful to stay connected to past coworkers, and allow yourself to fully feel the emotions of the loss before pursuing new work, if you can.