I’m hearing rumours of small-scale layoffs from a few different places around Ottawa, mostly small-to-medium-sized companies.

Just a single layoff affects dozens of people:

• the person who’s let go
• the person’s family
• the managers who have to do the firing
• the person’s work friends, who’ll miss the lunchtime chats and drinks after work
• the person’s coworkers, who’ll have to pick up the extra load
• people from other organizations or members of the public who had dealings with the person
• the restaurant owner across the street, who always had a special curry set aside for his favorite customer
• (and so on)

When the slowdown became inescapable in November, many companies may have decided to postpone layoffs until after the Christmas holidays, out of kindness. The holidays are over now, and today (January 5) is the first day everyone will be back at work, so there could be a lot of postponed pain hitting all at once.

Are these just a few isolated incidents, or will today be the day that the economic slowdown starts to seem real to people in the tech industry?