Scrapped
Leadership + Management Insights
By: Brandy Brown
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In late 2024, a company’s Chief Human Resources Officer claimed on Slack that the workers left behind by the tech layoffs were “somebody else’s table scraps” that had been discarded. Table scraps — the low-quality remainder after the real talent had already been claimed, the things you give your dog.
The implication was clear: if a company let you go, there was probably a reason. The market had spoken. Move on.
I'd like to introduce that woman to Meta Business Suite.
I was helping someone get a small apparel business off the ground by setting up a basic ad.
What followed was an education in organizational archaeology.
Meta Business Suite has an Ads tab. It also has an Ads Manager.
These are not the same thing, yet they fail to explain their relationship to each other.
The Ads Manager has its own Campaigns section. Then there's a Campaign Planner.
Whether these are the same thing, adjacent things, or competing things is left as an exercise for the user.
There's a Boost button on posts, which creates an ad, but not in the way the Ads tab creates an ad, and none of it is labeled clearly enough to tell you which campaign you're in or whether you're in one at all.
You can see the layers.
Someone built the Ads Manager.
Then someone else built an Ads tab.
Then someone built a Boost feature because acquisition needed a simpler entry point.
Then nobody ever went back and reconciled any of it — because that's not exciting work. That's maintenance work.
That's 'scrap' work.
And the people who did it are gone.
· · ·
Meta is just the most spectacular example.
The breakage is everywhere once you start looking.
Windows 11 didn't just degrade — it actively destroyed functioning systems. People lost use of their mice, their keyboards, hardware that worked fine the day before.
The evidence isn't hard to find. It's sitting on Microsoft's own support pages and in Reddit threads full of people whose computers became paperweights overnight.
The support page is now locked and migrated to somewhere unspecified.
No link provided.
Go find it yourself.
Someone was supposed to catch that before it shipped.
Someone was supposed to ask what happens to people running older machines.
Someone was supposed to care that a working thing might stop working.
That person is gone.
A woman I know runs a small manufacturing company, making parts for aircraft. Precision is not optional in that business — it is the business.
Forced software updates broke a QuickBooks function her team uses every single day.
The updates worked fine.
The seam between QuickBooks and Windows did not.
So she called QuickBooks.
QuickBooks pointed at Windows.
Windows pointed at QuickBooks.
Nobody owned the gap.
The shop floor waited.
Four trips to a repair store later, she had her machine back.
How many hours is that? Whose fault is that?
The answer, if you follow the money, is that it's hers.
She absorbed it.
She paid the tax.
TikTok Shop requires an EIN verification letter from the IRS to open a storefront even though no such requirement exists to operate a business in America.
The requirement lives somewhere deep in their compliance stack. Nobody owns the question of whether it should still be there, whether it matches reality, or whether it's doing more harm than good.
It just sits there, doing the wrong thing perfectly.
All while small business owners navigate IRS processing delays that can stretch for months.
That's not a broken feature.
That's a requirement nobody ever came back to question.
That's 'scrap' work left undone.
· · ·
Here's what all of these have in common: the user pays.
They may not always pay in money, but they always pay in time. And, as we all know, time is money.
They pay in the three hours spent trying to figure out
why two Ads Managers disagree with each other,
why a Windows update broke a QuickBooks function,
why TikTok needs paperwork that the federal government doesn't.
The user sits down to do a thing, and instead spends the day working for the tool.
We work for the tool.
The tool doesn't work for us.
The product stopped serving you so gradually — one unreconciled feature at a time, one unmaintained seam at a time — that most people had no choice, but to adapt.
They learned the workarounds.
They found the right tab, eventually.
They called the repair shop.
They filed the IRS paperwork.
They absorbed it.
And the companies never noticed. They weren't watching your friction.
They were watching a different set of numbers entirely — the ones that went up when the headcount went down.
All the while, you were paying them to work around their broken tool, and they were too busy announcing the next thing to even consider it.
About those table scraps...
Those workers weren't table scraps.
They were the ones who knew where the bodies were buried
— which feature had quietly broken,
which update needed compatibility testing,
which requirement had outlived its reason.
They were the people who saw the seams and quietly kept them from showing. The product looked clean because someone was doing that work.
That someone is gone.
And they were shown the door under the guise of AI — Gen-AI, specifically, a technology these same companies demonstrably don't understand, can't explain, and haven't deployed in a single place that wows and inspires.
Broken products are a care signal. They tell you exactly how much thought went into your experience when the numbers got tight. It tells you who absorbed the cost of the decision.
Table scraps? Maybe. But look at your product now.
