Tech Layoffs: important lessons to recession proof yourself

thank you brilliant for sponsoring today's video let's set the scene you go to work at metal in the beautiful Menlo Park campus in California you've worked there for five years now as a data scientist you've done good work and you've worked hard and as a reward you've risen through the ranks in the first two years you went up a level in the next another level and now you're finally a senior data scientist to celebrate you took out a mortgage and bought a house for a cool two million dollars but you don't bat an eye that's perfectly normal in the Bay Area you also don't bat an eye at the tech lifestyle that so many people are envious of free food gym table tennis pretty much everything you can possibly want within that one campus you use your work phone and your work laptop and it doubles as your personal phone and your personal laptop most of your clothes now is company swag you get something new pretty much every single month when there's an event that's being held plus it's more convenient don't have to buy your own clothes anymore meta the company has become intertwined with your life and your lifestyle and it's been like this for five years now but today is different you're extremely nervous because it's layoff day we're more like layoff week it's something that you can hardly imagine you've never even considered this possibility the other day it suck announced that they'll be letting go 11 000 people will you be one of them there are so many thoughts rolling in your mind right now the mortgage the house and in some ways even more so your own identity this company has slowly and slowly taken up a large portion of your life which by the way is totally intended to by HR as a means of reducing turnover but yeah it's happening you could lose this people don't get laid off in big tech companies unless you really [ __ ] up this industry is supposed to be the most resilient but guess what it's not you see this is the reality of a lot of people I am an ex meta employee and I still have a lot of friends that work at meta and other tech companies as well I can somewhat empathize with how they feel but even not so much because for me I started working at meta during the pandemic and I haven't really been into that lifestyle before I left but I do understand that culture and just the pain and shock that people must be feeling with the sudden realization that nothing is guaranteed you see for me I quit my job on my own volition back in March I didn't know what was happening I was super stressed out I was super anxious but at least it was my choice but many people 11 000 people have met up they didn't have a choice suddenly their stable lifestyle is just it was just disrupted gone so in this video I want to talk about the takeaways from this it's a wake-up call whether you are someone that got laid off who works in Tech and luckily didn't get laid off somebody that strives for attack and the stable lifestyle or just like any employee in general just considering the reality of this can be very scary but I would argue isn't it even scarier if you didn't know this was happening and you're caught by surprise before I get started I just want to make a plug for my newsletter called bloops keyboard talk about productivity coding it's also the first place where I drop announcements of things so you should sign up it is free all right let's talk about takeaways as I was saying before this scenario that I laid out previously is very much the reality of a lot of people before this you might have also heard about the Twitter layoff where Twitter laid off 50 of its contractors and the way they did it was so cruel like people literally didn't have any notice no idea this was happening and they only found out when they logged onto their internal system I realized that they didn't have access anymore no notice seriously in my opinion first Twitter then meta I do think it's a Harbinger like a foreshadowing of what is to come and I wouldn't be surprised that it just ripples through the tech industry and probably also like repost through other Industries in general but I'm no Economist so take that with a grain of salt that's just kind of like my theory regardless the biggest and perhaps obvious takeaway that you should get from this is that jobs are not stable no matter how stable it may feel it's kind of funny because when I first said I was going to quit my job and go do things by myself people were saying like oh my God how can you possibly leave such a good job and trade such a stable life or something that's so unstable and they're right it is risky it is unstable and the future is not guaranteed I can clearly see that but I would argue that being an employee is just as bad if not actually worse the analogy that I would use here um is do your own thing it's kind of like a rough seat like you're sailing across the sea and there's ups and downs there's bumps along the way and you can see that there's no illusion of this but as you gaze across the Horizon you can see kind of like where the ups and downs are in the waves it's not like you can control these ways but at least you can see them and you can somewhat prepare yourself for what's to come on the other hand being an employee I would describe it as kind of like this calm stable C you know you're just seeing it everything looks stable everything looks steady but then [ __ ] just hits the fan like a [ __ ] sinkhole just goes in and your entire ship just droughts out of nowhere so the lesson here don't [ __ ] trust companies they're not there to provide for you first and foremost they're there for profit they're there to save themselves their survival comes first yours comes second you need to be the one that puts your own Survival first and I'll talk a little bit more about how to do that later in the video but before then second takeaway you have never really made it you can get an amazing job people tell you oh my God like you know you are gonna be set for the rest of your life no do not get complacent especially in our day and age it's not like our parents anymore you can't just go and expect to work at a factory for 50 years and get rewarded for this kind of loyalty some of the biggest companies right now they didn't even exist like 20 30 years ago here's an interesting statistic so they started publishing The Fortune 500 list which is the 500 highest revenue I believe companies in the United States so they started doing this in 1955. as of 2022 49 of those companies I started off are still on the list today working on one of those fan companies manga companies was like working in IBM in the past klogs Toys R Us Kodak companies rise and fall and history just repeats itself the company itself is not even stable and they themselves are constantly fighting for survival so you as an individual you should also be constantly fighting for survival all right so what to do here is my advice I rank the things to do based upon least paranoid to most paranoid and it'll take some time to go up the scale of paranoia don't worry I'm not going to tell you that the ultimate goal is to quit your job start your own company and do your own thing and have and Be Your Own Boss I think that's actually something that's not realistic or desirable for most people okay so the first stage that the minimum that you should do is called upskilling at the very least pay attention to the career path that you're on economy as a whole what are the trends that are happening in software engineering are companies hiring more towards people who are back in developers that are front-end developers or what about data scientists is the hiring slowing down are people transitioning more into Data engineering once you realize these things you need to learn to upskill you need to continuously learn and keep up take courses join communities read books it's so important to build a habit of self-studying a lifetime learning I know too some of you it may sound so obvious but seriously I know a lot of people who genuinely don't know this like people who work at top tech companies who don't realize this and one more thing that's pretty low effort but can serve you very well in your time of need is to expand your network and to keep in touch with your network there's this concept of strong connections and weak connections strong connections are people that are very similar to you probably have the same career path as you um you guys are like very close friends on the other hand weak connections are people you don't talk to very frequently they may be on different career tracks and are very different from you it's actually these weak connections where you get the most opportunities from because they're different from you and they're able to get exposure to opportunities that you yourself wouldn't have so make sure to keep these weak connections intact it doesn't have to be a lot of effort it's literally like once or twice a year maybe just say hi like you know just check up on how they're doing things like that LinkedIn errors are one of the best like when all the tech layoffs started happening I notice on my LinkedIn that people were able to help other people that were from different areas of tech where like different Industries in general okay the next level of looking out for yourself and protecting yourself is to have different sources of revenue I know that passive income is like super popular these days and everybody wants it's passive income but it doesn't really matter especially in the beginning can be passive income it can be active income just diversify your income stream first thing that you should do is set up a business entity understand how business income Works how business taxes work and you may find that holy [ __ ] being in business and earning business income is so much better than earning personal income for example in North America don't know about other countries personal income is taxed on Revenue so it's the amount of total amount of money that you earned while for business income your tax on profit so is revenue minus the cost of operating that business and on top of that personal income tax is so much higher but for business income it's pretty flat until you get to something like 500 000 or a million dollars pretty crazy right so when I realized this I was like holy [ __ ] I can't believe I haven't taken advantage of this for such a long time and you may be realizing this right now as well so how to get different sources of income obviously for me I prefer content creation I prefer YouTube but that's not something that everybody wants to do there are lots of other ways like making online courses Airbnb is a very popular one managing other people's places for airbn and b or if you have the capital to buy something and then run it as a Airbnb if you bought a house and you have a mortgage consider renting out half of it to cover your mortgage another thing is if you have a little bit more experience especially in a more technical field doing something like Consulting is a great way of starting to make active income all right stage number three the final stage of paranoias is to start a side business so what this may look like is you build up the Diversified income streams that you had previously and just building that up into a business for example you manage people's Airbnb okay so you start managing more airbnbs you start investing more in places have an Airbnb business if you're doing something like YouTube or content creation you're consistently creating videos and building up that passive income stream as well as actively earning more money from things like sponsorships like this video say you're doing consultancy on the side you may now think about how do I secure longer term contracts with clients for like six months or maybe a year and at this point you can then decide do I want to quit my job and just do these things full time or you're like okay I just want to keep doing my job and also do this thing just a word of warning it's very hard to actually run two things at once I actually only know one person who's managed to pull it off and I'm pretty sure he sleeps like three hours a day but yes regardless once you get to that point you have that option and options give you protection and they give you leverage all right so that's all I have for you guys today now a word from our sponsor if you're looking into upskilling by taking online courses and learning more technical fields to sponsor today's video brilliant is a great way to get started brilliant is a stem learning platform that specializes in interactive Hands-On learning what makes brilliant such a good platform is that it's actually specialized in stem subjects are hard and they often require a lot of problem solving and Hands-On learning to really grasp these Concepts brilliant's courses and math statistics computer science physics are all carefully crafted and features Interactive problem-based Learning which research has proven is the most effective way of learning stem subjects in fact when I was doing interviews brilliant was the number one recommended resource especially for brushing up on stats and math even now when I'm not doing interviews I still refresh myself using brilliant they have Timeless course offerings like math and stats programming with python which you all know I think is like one of the most valuable skills to have as well as new course offering things to explore topics like neural networks and Quantum Computing you can join in millions of people already learning on brilliant at www. brilliant. org Tina Huang to get started for free also in description if you go through my link to First 200 people will get 20 off an annual membership alright that is all I have for you guys today I hope you found this video to be helpful let me know in the comments about what you think about dtac layups does it make you nervous do you notice similar things that are happening in your company where your friends companies where your industry as a whole I would love to know because honestly like a lot of my experience a lot of things that I know is very isolated in the tech industry okay so I will see you guys in the next video where live stream foreign