What tech layoffs taught me in 2023

Simply after we thought that life goes again to regular after the pandemic outbreak, a wave of tech layoff caught all of us tech employees abruptly. In 2023, greater than 240K tech employees had been laid off throughout greater than 1,000 firms; the newest layoff at Google and Discord signifies that it’s persevering with in 2024. Each my present firm and my pervious firm had a couple of spherical of layoff over the past yr, with a few of my associates impacted.

Though that is the not the primary time layoffs occurred within the business, the cuts had been deeper than up to now. Previous layoffs had typically centered on capabilities resembling Gross sales and Recruiting that had been instantly affected by slowdowns within the enterprise and hiring. This time, nonetheless, the impression was throughout the board together with technical capabilities like software program engineers and knowledge scientists.

It’s human nature desirous to distill patterns and learnings from issues, particularly as a knowledge scientist (in any case, that’s one of many key elements of your job). So like a superb knowledge scientist, I sat down at first of the yr to conduct a “submit mortem”.

Whereas it’s onerous to foretell beforehand which crew/who can be impacted by a layoff (until you might be one of many choice makers), I feel as a knowledge scientist, there are issues you are able to do to make your self extra “layoff-proof”. And I’ll share just a few right here:

Keep updated in regards to the firm and org’s strategic route

Why? In the case of layoffs, the choice about which groups/people to let go is normally extremely depending on the corporate’s technique and prioritization in the intervening time. For instance, if an organization for a number of quarters has been making an attempt to make dashboard constructing and metric reporting extra self-serviceable, when a spherical of layoff comes, any crew that focuses on dashboard making and metric reporting can be thought-about.

Bear in mind, issues don’t occur in a single day; there are indicators which you could take as a heads up. Precedence shifts normally can’t be applied in a single day and even in a single quarter. Within the instance above, earlier than letting go of the entire crew of DS who’re constructing dashboards/reporting…