/Technology

There is a dimension the title captures well but deserves to be unpacked further: the "paying twice" is not only financial, it is reputational and cultural. Companies that conducted mass layoffs wielding AI as justification now face a talent market with a long memory. The most skilled professionals, precisely those these organizations will need to rehire, watched what happened and are pricing in the risk of working for employers who instrumentalize technology to justify decisions that were primarily about cost. The CTO who needs to rebuild an engineering team in 2026 will find that trust cannot be reconstructed with a competitive salary package. That is the second installment of the debt, and perhaps the most expensive one of all.