The Fever

In the emergency, employers asked everything of their workers. In the recovery, they remembered none of it.

When the offices closed in March 2020, the first job was to keep the work running from ten thousand kitchens and spare rooms, and to secure it. Almost overnight the corporate network stopped being a building with a perimeter and became a sprawl of home routers, personal laptops, and cloud services bought in a hurry. The attack surface that security teams had spent years trying to draw a line around lost its edges in a fortnight.

The spending followed, after a strange pause. For a few months firms froze what they could and triaged for survival, and Gartner watched global technology budgets fall and security growth nearly stall. Then the dam broke the other way. Cloud purchases that analysts had penciled in for 2023 and 2024 began arriving in 2022, as five-year migration plans turned into eighteen-month ones and more than two-thirds of corporate boards rushed to accelerate the digital projects they had been deferring for a decade. By 2021, with the workforce remote and the attack surface wide open, security was the line that more chief information officers were raising than any other. A field pulled forward by years would spend the next several living with what it had bolted on in a panic. That is the part of Long COVID that belongs to the organization: the debt the scramble left on the books.

The other part of the debt belongs to the people. In the emergency, employers asked their workers for things no contract had priced. The first ask fell on the people who could not do their jobs from a kitchen table and were told to come in anyway, and they paid for it in the most literal currency there is. Studies of occupational mortality later found that in 2020, Americans in jobs with no work-from-home option died of COVID at roughly twice the rate of those who could log on from home. The losses fell hardest on the ones who could not stay home: the people who grew and hauled the food, and the people who kept the warehouses and plants running. A society calls those workers essential when it needs them and stops thinking about them when it does not.

The second ask fell on the people who could stay home, and it was quieter. The office moved into the house and refused to leave. The span of the average workday stretched by roughly forty-nine minutes. That did not necessarily mean more hours worked; it meant the line between the desk and the kitchen table had dissolved, and the working day now bled into the rest of life. Many of the people carrying that longer day were carrying a good deal more besides it. With schools and daycare shut, someone had to teach the children and watch them, and the someone was usually a woman. The caregiving crisis fell on mothers with particular force. By October 2020 there were 2.2 million fewer women in the American labor force than a year earlier; by the following February, women's participation had dropped to a level last seen in 1988, a generation of gains undone in eleven months. Some had been laid off from shuttered industries. Many found they could not hold a full-time job and a full day of caregiving at once, and so they stopped being counted as workers at all. The name that stuck for it was the she-cession. None of it was written down, which is why it was so easy to forget.

Most people in cybersecurity sat on the safer side of the worst of this. The work went home to a laptop, which spared many of them the exposure that killed essential workers. It did not spare them the rest. For women in the field, as everywhere, the schools and daycare closed all the same, and the home office and the homeschool ended up in the same room. The bargain still reached cyber, in a lighter form: keep the systems running while everything moved at once, and trust that the effort would count for something when ordinary judgment returned.

The labor market that absorbed those demands first cratered and then ran hot. The spring of 2020 erased about 22 million jobs in two months, the steepest collapse on record. Then, faster than anyone expected, the part of the economy that ran through a screen began to boom. Technology firms hired as though the conditions of 2020 were the permanent future; Meta enlarged its headcount by about sixty percent across the pandemic, and it was not unusual. For a brief window the leverage that had sat with employers for a generation passed to workers, and they used it. In November 2021 a record 4.5 million of them quit in a single month, and the rate of quitting hit a high it had not reached in the two decades the government had kept the count. The reward for moving was real: the median raise for a person who changed jobs climbed to about 7.7 percent, the widest advantage over those who stayed put that the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta had ever measured. For the workers who could move, the way to get paid was to leave.

Cybersecurity sat in the middle of it. The field had spent years repeating that it faced a shortage of millions, and now, with budgets surging and the perimeter gone, the shortage story finally had a market hot enough to make it seem true. Recruiters worked down lists of anyone holding a Security+ or a CISSP. Bootcamps and certificate programs sold a fast road into a field that seemed to have left its door open, and career-changers believed it and came, out of help-desk jobs and second careers they were glad to leave. Postings climbed to a peak in January 2022. Salaries chased them. Remote-first hiring meant that a person in a small town three time zones from the nearest tech hub could, for the first time, work for the companies that had always been somewhere else.

A market that hot cannot afford to be choosy. When the openings far outnumber the people who can fill them, an employer has no time to test who can do the job, and the credential becomes a ticket: it gets a plausible candidate through the door, and hiring moves on. The certification still screened for something, but in a market this pressed it screened chiefly for plausibility. For a year or two that got people hired, which is not the same as measuring the thing the credential was meant to stand for. What looked like the proxies finally paying off was demand outrunning the field's ability to be selective, a different thing and a temporary one.

Then the fever broke. The companies that had staffed for a future that did not arrive began shedding people in 2022, and the admissions came stapled to the layoffs. Mark Zuckerberg told Meta's employees he had assumed the pandemic surge would be permanent and had been wrong. "I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that," he wrote. Marc Benioff reached the same verdict at Salesforce, telling staff the company had "hired too many people" through the pandemic and taking responsibility for it. The economist Betsey Stevenson compressed the whole episode: the firms had "hired for magical thinking," and were now readjusting to reality. The readjustment was not small. Meta cut eleven thousand jobs that November and ten thousand more the next spring; Amazon cut eighteen thousand in January 2023, the deepest reduction in its history, and nine thousand after that; Google shed twelve thousand and Microsoft about ten thousand in the same weeks. Across the industry the count passed a hundred thousand inside a year. When the demand that had made hiring indiscriminate dried up, the indiscriminate hiring was the first thing to stop, and many of the people it had waved through found the door shut behind them.

The pain did not stop with the people who lost their jobs. Those who kept theirs watched their pay shrink in real terms, eroded by an inflation that no employer had chosen. Consumer prices peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022, the steepest in four decades, and average real earnings fell for twenty-five straight months, so that for two years workers took a cut while being told the labor market had never been stronger. The inflation ran on two engines worth naming and not overstating: supply chains still knotted from the lockdowns, and the demand of the recovery itself. And the one thing the pandemic had handed workers, the freedom to do the job from anywhere, was taken back. The return-to-office mandates that hardened over the next two years reached their fullest form when Amazon ordered roughly 350,000 corporate employees back five days a week from January 2025. By then, in JLL's count, fifty-four percent of Fortune 100 companies required full-time office attendance, up from five percent two years earlier. Employers did it against their workers' stated preferences, and against a real if incomplete body of evidence. A study by researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan found that mandates at three large technology firms drove senior people out, fastest where the policy was strictest, and warned that the loss carried real costs in output and competitiveness.

The return to office ran on more than one motive, collaboration and the cost of half-empty buildings among them. Underneath the stated reasons, though, sat a familiar reflex. A manager who cannot see the work reaches for the nearest visible thing, and the nearest visible thing is a body at a desk. Presence stood in for productivity because the work was easier to watch than to measure well. It is the same move as a degree standing in for competence, or a certification standing in for tested skill, and it points back to the same gap: a system that cannot tell who is working ends up watching people sit.

The two sides kept different accounts of the emergency. Many firms remembered what it had cost them, the overhiring most of all, and set about correcting those entries. What the workers had carried was harder to enter on a balance sheet. They had taken real things from the fever, the leverage to move and a few years of working from anywhere, and the recovery reversed those first. The flexibility was clawed back and real pay was left to fall. What the sacrifices bought was no durable claim, nothing the system was obliged to honor once the market turned, because no one had written down that anything was owed. It is the same kind of forgetting the prologue traced at the scale of a nation, working here at the scale of a payroll, because a debt is easiest to settle by losing the record of it. Workers keep their own records. Next in the series: the chronic phase, and what the fever left behind.

Skill:Signal:Trust is the daily newsletter of Aramis, which assesses cybersecurity candidates against the NIST NICE Framework, an attempt to measure capability where the field has learned to settle for proxies.

Source notes

Gartner, for the 2020 spending pause (security spending growth nearly stalling that year) and the subsequent pull-forward of cloud and digital transformation: cloud spending projected for 2023 and 2024 arriving by 2022, and roughly 69 percent of boards accelerating digital initiatives; and for cyber and information security ranking as the leading area of increased CIO investment heading into 2021.

The "five-year cloud plan, now eighteen months" compression is an industry characterization from analysts at the time (reported by Dark Reading), not a Gartner figure.

Occupational COVID-19 mortality research (medRxiv working papers and CDC industry-and-occupation data), for the estimate that workers without a work-from-home option died at roughly twice the rate of those who could work remotely in 2020, with the highest mortality in agriculture, transportation and logistics, manufacturing, and facilities. The figure is drawn from occupational-mortality studies rather than a single settled count.

NBER Working Paper 27612 (DeFilippis, Impink, Singell, Polzer, and Sadun, 2020), for the average workday span lengthening about 48.5 minutes after lockdowns, with the authors' caution that a longer span need not mean more hours actually worked.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, via RAND, for 2.2 million fewer women in the labor force in October 2020 than a year earlier; reporting drawing on BLS for women's labor-force participation reaching a 1988 low in February 2021. The term "she-cession" is the economist C. Nicole Mason's.

BLS, for the roughly 22 million jobs lost in spring 2020 and for the Great Resignation: a record 4.5 million quits in November 2021 and a quits rate of 3 percent, the highest since the series began in 2000.

Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta Wage Growth Tracker, for the median pay increase for job-switchers peaking near 7.7 percent and the gap between switchers and stayers reaching its widest on record during the Great Resignation.

CNBC, for Meta expanding headcount about 60 percent during the pandemic, and for the 2022 and 2023 layoff counts (Meta; Amazon's largest-ever workforce reduction; Google; Microsoft) totaling more than 100,000 across the industry within a year.

Cybersecurity job postings peaking in January 2022, carried from the job-market series.

Mark Zuckerberg's November 2022 memo ("I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that," and his statement that he had wrongly assumed the pandemic surge would last), reported by Business Insider, NPR, and CNBC. Marc Benioff's January 4, 2023 letter to Salesforce employees, in which he said the company had "hired too many people" through the pandemic and that he took responsibility for it, reported by Fortune, NBC News, and CBC. Betsey Stevenson ("hired for magical thinking"), via the University of Michigan Ford School and Yahoo Finance.

BLS, for the 9.1 percent CPI peak in June 2022 and twenty-five consecutive months of declining real average earnings.

The return-to-office wave: Amazon's mandate for roughly 350,000 corporate employees to return five days a week from January 2025 (announced September 2024); and JLL's Q2 2025 Office Market Dynamics report finding 54 percent of Fortune 100 companies on full-time office attendance, up from about 5 percent two years earlier (reported by Fortune and others). The senior-attrition finding is from "Return to Office and the Tenure Distribution," a working paper by researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan analyzing Microsoft, Apple, and SpaceX, which found senior departures rising with the strictness of the mandate (about 4 percent at Apple, 5 percent at Microsoft, and 15 percent at SpaceX) and warned of costs to output, innovation, and competitiveness (reported by the Washington Post and Fortune).