Change is constant in engineering organizations. Whether you’re growing quickly and onboarding dozens of engineers—or navigating the difficult process of layoffs—your systems, services, and institutional knowledge don’t pause. That’s where an Internal Developer Portal (IDP) becomes indispensable.
At Cortex, we’ve seen firsthand how engineering leaders use IDPs to manage both ends of the talent spectrum—making onboarding seamless and reducing risk during workforce reductions.
The Hidden Cost of Layoffs: Lost Context
Layoffs are more than a headcount change—they represent a loss of tribal knowledge. The engineers who built critical services, managed incidents, or understood the nuances of your infrastructure are suddenly gone. And what’s left? Gaps in ownership, documentation drift, and massive risk.
An engineering executive at a leading data streaming platform brought on Cortex the same day as an 18% layoff in the engineering org. Why? Because they realized the biggest risk wasn’t just fewer engineers—it was the loss of critical knowledge and operational continuity.
An IDP mitigates this risk by:
Codifying service ownership so responsibilities don’t disappear when someone leaves, and services aren’t orphaned.
Surfacing dependencies and on-call rotations, so incident response isn’t held up by uncertainty.
Maintaining visibility into documentation, standards, and production readiness across teams—regardless of who’s left.
In turbulent times, an IDP becomes your even-more-important system of record for service quality, ownership, and engineering operations.
Onboarding at Scale: From Chaos to First Commit
On the flip side, when companies are in hypergrowth, onboarding becomes a bottleneck. If you’re hiring dozens of engineers a quarter, it’s not enough to have a wiki page or rely on tribal onboarding. Engineers need to go from “new hire” to “productive contributor” as quickly as possible—without constant hand-holding from senior teammates.
When developers start, they often spend more time searching for docs and figuring out processes than actually coding. Without a single place to find what they need, onboarding becomes unnecessarily slow and frustrating—for you, and for your new hires.
How does it work?
An IDP becomes your knowledge base, enabling new devs to find information about services they own, and dependencies across the team.
Automate access with workflows, so you can quickly kick off an onboarding workflow that creates profiles and entities in connected systems like Git and Pagerduty.
Create Onboarding Scorecards, so new devs follow your onboarding scorecard to complete all expected tasks.
Streamlining onboarding of new engineering resources with an IDP like Cortex:
Ensures registration across all platform tools
Aligns new devs to standards and best practices
Enables reports on onboarding status across teams
Preparing for the Future
Engineering leaders today must be ready for both contraction and expansion. Whether you're bracing for market headwinds or gearing up for the next wave of hiring, an IDP helps you:
Preserve institutional knowledge
Speed up onboarding
Reduce downtime and incident impact
Keep standards intact through organizational change
In a world of constant flux, the IDP becomes your engineering command center, ensuring that your organization remains agile and resilient.
Want to see how Cortex can help your team navigate change more confidently?
Request a demo and learn how top engineering teams are future-proofing their organizations for tomorrow, and creating a culture of Engineering Excellence today.
