My Experience in my First Collective Layoff

I had been at IriusRisk for a little over six years when it ended. Not because the product failed. Because our competitor bought us.

ThreatModeler, an American company, acquired IriusRisk. What followed was months of uncertainty, a legal fight for fair treatment, and a collective layoff that only affected the Spanish employees.

This was my first collective layoff. Here's what happened.

The acquisition

IriusRisk and ThreatModeler operated in the same space - threat modeling platforms, enterprise security, standards-aligned workflows. American companies in that market often have advantages European ones struggle to match: funding scale, sales reach, brand recognition in US enterprise procurement, and the gravity of being "the default option" in a market that already looks toward America for security tooling.

Competing with that from Spain is hard. Not impossible - we had strong product depth, serious standards work, loyal customers. But hard.

The acquisition wasn't a surprise in hindsight. It's the kind of move that happens when two vendors realize the market won't sustain both stories forever - and the bigger balance sheet wins.

We learned the full implications gradually. Acquisitions are rarely clean merges. They're overlapping roadmaps, duplicate roles, and someone drawing a map of who stays and who doesn't.

January: the meeting that changed the year

The first week of January, we were called into a meeting.

Not the casual all-hands kind. The kind where leadership speaks carefully and HR is present before you've processed why.

The message, simplified: the acquisition changes things. Roles, geographies, and structures would be reviewed. Not everyone would have a place in the combined company.

From that moment, 2026 had a shadow over it.

Two months of uncertainty

What followed wasn't immediate clarity. It was negotiation fog.

We didn't know how terms would land. We didn't know timelines. We didn't know whether "integration" meant opportunity or exit. You can't plan a life - mortgage, family, career moves - on fog.

Those two months felt like suspended animation. You show up. You work - because you're professional. You refresh email too often. You talk to colleagues in half-sentences because nobody wants to jinx or panic anyone. You watch American colleagues continue while Spanish roles sit in question marks.

That geographic split was the part that stung most.

Competing with America, laid off in Spain

I'm not going to pretend this was purely business logic with no geography involved.

American tech acquiring European teams often follows a pattern: product absorption, go-to-market consolidation, and regional redundancy. The Spanish team - talented, experienced, deeply embedded in how IriusRisk actually worked - became structurally expendable in the combined chart.

That's not a comment on American people. Many colleagues on the other side were great. It's a comment on power and scale. When a US company buys a EU vendor, the EU team often carries the integration cost with their jobs.

We spent years building threat modeling depth, standards automation, client trust. The acquisition erased that runway in a spreadsheet column titled synergy.

Competing with American companies from Europe isn't just a product challenge. It's a labor market reality - one morning you're building, the next you're a line item in someone else's integration plan.

May: the layoff

In May, it became official for the Spanish employees: collective layoff.

The call was professional. HR present. Manager present. Script delivered with care - which somehow makes it worse, because you can hear humanity in the voice reading words designed by lawyers.

They explained timelines, access wind-down, support resources. I asked practical questions: access end date, references, paperwork.

The severance negotiation

After negotiation - including employee-side legal representation - we secured severance terms above what was first on the table.

If you've navigated Spanish labor transitions, you know how much that matters. It's not abstract generosity; it's the difference between breathing room and immediate panic. It was the outcome of organized pressure, legal support, and employees refusing to sign the first draft that landed on the table.

The HR team deserves applause

I want to say this clearly: the entire HR team was deeply involved with us throughout the process, trying to make it as painless as something like this can be.

HR is easy to villainize in layoffs - they're in the room, they deliver the message. But in our case, they were also advocates, explainers, and buffers between frightened employees and institutional machinery moving faster than any individual could.

They answered the same questions multiple times without making people feel stupid. They pushed internally where they could. They treated us like humans while the structure treated us like rows.

That matters. If you're HR reading this during an integration: what you did was seen. Thank you.

The first days after

The laptop still worked for a while. That surreal phase - terminated but logged in - is its own kind of grief.

Goodbye messages in Slack. Quiet DMs. Some people already pivoting to networking mode. Everyone meaning well, everyone afraid.

Then IT started wiping PCs across the office - one machine at a time, people logging out and not coming back. We watched colleagues disappear from the building and from every channel in real time. At some point someone said it out loud, and we all laughed because it was too accurate: it felt like that scene where half the room vanishes and the rest of us are still standing there, blinking, trying to process who just turned to dust.

We said goodbye that way. Half-joking, half-stunned. A few messages that tried to sound normal and failed. The Spanish team, gone in batches, while the screens in the open office kept going dark.

Then access ended. The channels kept going without me.

What I learned

Acquisitions are not mergers. Someone else's roadmap becomes your uncertainty.

Geography matters. "Global team" rhetoric doesn't always survive cost consolidation.

Legal representation for employees is not optional in collective processes.

HR can be an ally even when the news is bad.

For six years I was "Álvaro, a Security Researcher from IriusRisk." Overnight I was "open to opportunities.". But hopefully I'll be helping other companies soon, somehow.