u/AdSecret5838

$185 million in severence and exit costs. Six hundred employees out the door rather than accept five days in office. That's the number Paramount Skydance reported in their Q3 shareholder letter and it has been sitting in my head for three months.

Here's what's eating at me. The company tried to spin it as a cost. The market read it as a cost. But $185 million divided by 600 people is roughly $308,000 per person, which means these were senior people and the loss is going to take Paramount years to feel in their content, their pipelines, their institutional knowledge. The same execs who pushed the mandate are now reporting record severance costs and quietly hiring replacements at higher salaries.

The lesson everyone took from this was wrong. People keep saying "RTO is a stealth layoff." That's not the news. The news is that 600 people had the savings, the leverage, or the desperation to walk away from a major employer rather than commute. Six hundred.

So my question for this sub. Are we organizing or are we just venting?

I am asking because I don't know. I am six months from being able to walk myself. My partner is two years out. We are not the only people in our orbit running the same numbers. If 600 people at one company can do this, what does 6,000 people at six companies look like? What does 60,000 look like?

I am not advocating for anything specific. I am asking what the next move is. Because the next move feels like it should not be "wait until our individual finances align." It feels like it should be something else.

Open to ideas. Even the bad ones.

every agency has a content client whose traffic is flat or declining. the question is always "what should we do about it." most teams answer by publishing more content, which usually accelerates the decline.

here's the audit process i run before recommending anything.

hour 1: structural diagnosis.

pull these from search console:

• top 50 landing pages by impressions
• top 50 landing pages by clicks
• top 50 queries by impressions
• top 50 queries by clicks

cross-reference the lists. you're looking for 4 things:

1. pages with high impressions and low CTR. these are ranking for things but losing the click. usually a title tag problem or a SERP feature (AI overview, featured snippet, "people also ask") is eating the click.

2. pages with high clicks and low impressions. these are ranking for things you didn't expect them to rank for. opportunity to expand the topic.

3. queries the site shows up for but no page is targeted at. accidental rankings. usually a sign the site has authority you're not leveraging.

4. pages that drove traffic 6 months ago and now don't. content decay. usually pages that ranked because nothing better existed, and now better content has been published by someone else.

hour 2: content quality audit on the top 20 pages by impressions.

read each one. score it on 4 dimensions:

is the content actually useful for the searcher's intent. not "is it written well." is it the answer the searcher needed.

is it dated or stale. is the example from 2019. is the screenshot from a UI that doesn't exist anymore.

is it longer than it needs to be. content padded to "rank for long-tail" usually doesn't rank for long-tail anymore. it just bores the reader.

is there a clear next action. or does the reader hit the bottom of the page with nowhere to go.

most pages fail on 2 or more of these dimensions. write down which ones.

hour 3: competitive snapshot for the top 10 priority queries.

priority queries are the ones with high impressions where you rank 5-20 and could realistically move to 1-10 with work.

for each query, open an incognito browser. look at:

the actual SERP. is there an AI overview eating clicks. is there a "people also ask" box. is there a featured snippet held by a competitor.

the top 3 results. read each one. note how long they are, how they're structured, what they include that you don't.

the SERP intent. is it informational (people are researching), commercial (people are comparing), transactional (people are buying). does your page match the intent of the SERP, or is it a different intent than what's currently ranking?

a lot of "we used to rank for this" pages have the wrong intent. SERP shifted from informational to commercial. your page is still informational. google moved on.

hour 4: prioritization.

now you have data. categorize every page into one of 4 buckets:

bucket 1: kill. pages that have no impressions, no rankings, and no internal links. they're dead weight diluting authority. either redirect to a relevant page or delete and let them 404.

bucket 2: update. pages with impressions and rankings that need refresh. update content, fix title tags, add internal links, refresh examples. don't rewrite. update.

bucket 3: rewrite. pages where the intent has shifted or the quality is genuinely poor. these need to be rebuilt with current SERP intent in mind.

bucket 4: protect. pages that are working. leave them alone. don't touch them unless their performance starts to decline.

usually the breakdown is something like 25-35% kill, 25-35% update, 15-25% rewrite, 15-25% protect. varies by site.

what to do with the audit.

prioritize updates over new content. updating an existing ranking page almost always outperforms publishing a new one. compound effect of internal links, existing backlinks, indexed history.

cap new content production to 25-30% of total content effort until the existing site is stable. teams that flip this ratio (mostly new, occasional update) usually keep declining.

run this audit every 6 months. content decay is continuous. the audit isn't a one-time fix.

what this audit doesn't do.

it doesn't fix technical SEO problems. crawlability, indexation, schema, page speed, mobile usability. those are a separate audit.

it doesn't generate new topic ideas. it tells you what to do with what you have. growing into new topics requires different research.

it doesn't replace strategic thinking. why is this site published. who's it for. what's the business model. these are the questions before the audit. if the answers are unclear, the audit will be technically correct and strategically pointless.

bottom line.

most content sites don't need more content. they need fewer pages doing more work. the audit forces the team to confront which pages are pulling weight and which are filler.

clients hate the audit at first because the recommendation is usually "publish less, kill more." they wanted you to recommend a topic cluster for q4. you're telling them to delete 40% of their existing posts. that's a harder conversation.

it's also the conversation that actually moves traffic.

what's your audit process or do you skip straight to new content production?

i am 47. i was a senior eng for nine years, then an EM for five, then back to senior IC three months ago. by choice. by relief.

the stack changed when i went back to IC. sharing because three of the women i mentored when i was an EM have asked me about it.

what i used as an EM:

slack as the constant background. lots of 1:1 dms. lots of coordinating. lots of meetings.

linear for visibility on what my team was doing.

notion for org docs, growth plans, my own private notes about each report.

a calendar that was 70% meetings.

zoom for everything.

what i use now as a senior ic:

slack still, but i am in fewer channels. i muted three. i did not announce that i muted them.

cursor for the actual code work. this is my primary tool now and it was barely in my stack as an EM.

linear for my own tickets, which is a different thing than tracking other people's tickets.

notion for design docs, RFC drafts, and architectural decisions i am writing for my team. about 4 documents in active rotation right now.

gamma for the technical talks i am giving internally. as an EM i never had time to give technical talks. as a senior IC i am giving one a month. the ai presentation tool turns my notion design docs into talk-shaped decks in 15 minutes. used to take me a Saturday.

excalidraw for the architecture diagrams that go in the talks. gamma cannot do these well.

a calendar that is now 20% meetings.

what i did not expect: the thing i miss most about being an EM is the mentorship. the thing i miss least is the slide work. as an EM i made probably 60 decks per year (team updates, headcount pitches, project readouts, reviews, reorgs). most of them were time-soak. as a senior IC i make maybe 12 decks per year and they are all things i actually want to make.

i am paid less now than i was as an EM. about 8% less. it is the best money trade i have ever made.

posting because if you are a woman EM thinking about going back to IC, the math may be in your favor in ways the standard career advice does not capture. the stack changes. the labor profile changes. your sleep changes. give the move serious consideration.

36 months together. Largest client by revenue. Their contract was up two weeks ago and they didn't renew.

The reason given was reasonable — internal restructure, my main contact moved to a different team, the new person wanted to bring in their own vendor. Hard to argue with.

The reason behind the reason is harder to swallow. We had stopped doing our best work for them probably 8 months ago. Got comfortable. Showed up to the same calls with the same updates. Didn't push. The new person presumably did a vendor review and we didn't survive it on quality, not on price.

I'm taking 30 days to sit with it before doing anything reactive. But I'm also curious what other people did when their largest client left and what they learned in the months after.

Specifically: did you replace that revenue, did the loss accelerate something good, and would you say in retrospect the loss was about them or about you

we built our entire reporting stack on Looker. 14 dashboards per client. data flowing in real-time.

last month a client said: 'this is great, but can you make me a one-pager that summarizes what's working? i don't have time to look at 14 dashboards.'

we now generate a monthly one-pager via gamma's AI presentation generator. it pulls 5 numbers from looker. our strategist writes 200 words of commentary. the deliverable takes 18 minutes/month/client.

clients love it. they pay us the same. nobody opens looker anymore.

we built a ferrari to deliver pizza. we should've delivered the pizza.