Simply once we thought that life goes again to regular after the pandemic outbreak, a wave of tech layoff caught all of us tech staff abruptly. In 2023, greater than 240K tech staff 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 pals impacted.
Though that is the not the primary time layoffs occurred within the trade, the cuts had been deeper than previously. Previous layoffs had typically targeted on capabilities similar to Gross sales and Recruiting that had been instantly affected by slowdowns within the enterprise and hiring. This time, nevertheless, the affect 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 an information scientist (in any case, that’s one of many key elements of your job). So like an excellent knowledge scientist, I sat down at first of the yr to conduct a “publish mortem”.
Whereas it’s onerous to foretell beforehand which group/who can be impacted by a layoff (until you might be one of many resolution makers), I believe as an information 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 relation to layoffs, the choice about which groups/people to let go is often extremely depending on the corporate’s technique and prioritization for the time being. 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 group that focuses on dashboard making and metric reporting can be thought-about.
Keep in mind, issues don’t occur in a single day; there are indicators that you would be able to take as a heads up. Precedence shifts often can’t be carried out in a single day and even in a single quarter. Within the instance above, earlier than letting go of the entire group of DS who’re constructing dashboards/reporting…