Software Engineers, stop worrying about layoffs.

and what can you actually do to better prepare yourself uh if the tech economy does take a turn for the wor in this video I'll share some tips on how you can essentially Recession Proof yourself okay I'll be the first one to admit that this video from last year was a bit naive on my part A lot of people were getting stressed out about the layoffs including me and that video was my attempt to pacify those fears by giving some pointers that may give you a better chance of not getting laid off while my intentions were good the truth is that there is no such thing as recession proofing yourself I'm not saying that we're all doomed I'm instead saying that you don't have to worry about the layoffs see over the course of the past year I've witnessed multiple rounds of layoffs seen my friends family members and colleagues get affected and also talked with multiple people who have had to cut resources from their own teams and that has completely changed my stance where I strongly believe that most of us have little to no control over when layoffs happen how they're executed and whether we are affected or not and in so many ways that realization has actually helped me become much more relaxed about the topic of recession and layoffs because there is really no point worrying about things that are absolutely outside our control so instead of giving you advice about layoff proofing yourself in this video I will share what I have learned about layoffs why they happen how they're executed especially in big tech companies and the three big reasons why people are Let Go My Hope Is That by learning more about the whole process you two will come to the same conclusion as I did that there's really no point to worrying about it all right let's get started hi folks my name is utav I'm a software engineer based in Seattle I have almost 20 years of experience in the industry where I've held diverse software engineering roles and created a few Tech startups and I'm currently at Microsoft if you're new to this channel my goal here is to help you get the best out of your career by mentoring you around five key pillars of career development technical skills engineering efficiency mindset entrepreneurship and Financial Freedom so if that sounds interesting please consider subscribing and follow me at engineering with UTA for behind the scenes and monthly q&as okay so let's start with why layoffs happen in the first place take 2022 2024 for example as you all know the global pandemic forced people to stay home for a extended period of time since you couldn't meet your friends and family face to face most people flocked over to communication platforms like Facebook messenger and FaceTime also everyone aside from essential workers were working from home so utilization of collaboration tools like teams and zoom went up by orders of magnitude and finally being locked in doors for so long also meant that we saw a major uptick in screen time for social media and streaming services like Facebook Twitter Instagram YouTube Netflix Hulu Disney plus and Prime video so naturally all these companies not only have to scale quickly to meet the unexpected demands but also higher rapidly to meet new growth projections while we did see a brief hiring freeze at the start of the pandemic in 2020 the moment they projected rapid growth for cloudbed applications there was a hiring frenzy beginning late 2020 through 2021 and 2022 this is reflected in the numbers as well by the end of 2020 top tech companies added a total of $3.4 trillion to their valuation well but as 2022 progressed things opened back up employees started going back to the office travel saw a major optic outdoor activities were back on the rise and even movie theists Saw the strongest attendances they had seen in over a decade in general most people were sick and tired of being locked indoors communicating through a screen the knock on effect was that the same app suddenly saw a drastic fall in usage and demand coincidentally at the same time all this was happening the industry also saw a major leap in terms of artificial intelligence permeating through to our daily lives open AI launched chat gbt towards the end of 2022 and you obviously know how that rapidly snowballed into the various AI incarnations like copilot Bard llama Gro Gemini and Sora being the latest one so basically in late 2022 all these big tech companies found themselves with two major problems one they had overinvestment by trimming down on the engineering headcount that was anticipated for the continued growth of cloud we saw that play out from late 2022 through to the summer of 2023 before the fiscal year ended in June 30 the second phase of the layoffs that started late 2023 and is happening now in 2024 is most likely to take care of the second problem to shift the engineering Talent towards ML and AI as traditional roles get caught you'll see continued investment on data science machine learning and artificial intelligence and the data reflects this as well a recent report from indeed shows that the percentage of job openings that have geni terms in their description has significantly increased compared to the Past few years not to mention layoffs also translates positively to stock growth for a company and that makes sense because as an investor you favor profitability but if you look at it from a different angle even though there have been a lot of layoffs since late 2022 the unemployment rates have not gone up and the labor market is still strong and companies are still hiring so this is more of a paradigm change where companies are trying to shift their talents for the long term so hopefully it's clear that when it comes to why layoffs happen none of us really have any control or influence over it anyway at some point in the pipeline someone will get the memo that they will have to reduce headcount in their or or Team by a certain number and they will need to decide who falls in this list and this is where the three main reasons that people are let go that I mentioned earlier in the video comes into play the first reason is financial every company has to meet their revenue and profit margins and as a function of that every organ team has to do the same and regardless of how much you humanize working for a company from the perspective of the book you are an expense that needs to be as low as feasible and when that crosses a certain threshold resources will need to get cut and from what I have heard this is the only time when having a very high compensation may get you into trouble this is based on anecdotes I've heard from people in the knowhow so take it with a grain of salt but say for example that you worked really hard for the first decade of your career at your company where you got very rapid promotions High bonuses and exemplary stock awards while this is great for your net worth you could stick out like a sore thumb when your total compensation is say 30% higher than the average good to high performer and maybe you continue to provide outside value to your team and that's fine but what if that value isn't outsized anymore they may have to cut their highest expense resources but then again what's the advice here to tell you not to earn money when you have the chance to to not accept bonuses and stock awards that were given to you for your hard work absolutely not right but also I don't think this is very common and possibly the last result res for any company because every company values their talent especially the top ones but even if laying off high earners to balance the books were to be common practice as I said what are you going to do not earn more when you have the opportunity to do the second reason why you may end up in the short list is because you are not meeting the performance expectations if the decision to cut the workforce has been made it would be natural to cut the folks that aren't meeting the bar first that would be a win-win for both the company and for the employees who are performing great that would have otherwise they had to let go but think about it this way if you are on the chopping block because you're underperforming you should be taking steps to remedy that with or without the layoff and in fact during the layoff is the worst time to try to fix your performance issue because it may just be too late by then so worrying about it or scrambling to make things right at the last moment may not even benefit you anyway look life happens and sometimes your performance can dip below the bar but the point I'm trying to make here is you should aspire to correct that right away and never be content on being below the expectation bar and this is not related to layoffs or recession or any other economic condition this has to do with your values and your work ethic everyone should continue to be curious expand their technical knowledge and their leadership all the time and if you live with that mindset the second reason for people getting laid off would never be a concern to you quick note before we continue if you are looking to move teams or companies in general the first thing to do is to build a solid resume that's where beam jobs today's video sponsor can help you beam jobs is one of the top resume builders in the United States with over 2 million rums created since their Inception in 2020 candidates who use their Resume Builder are hired by top companies like Google meta stripe and more let me quickly show you how easy it is to use beam jobs to create a new resume or to improve an existing one okay so you start by picking a template then importing your resume either from a document or from LinkedIn or you can create one from scratch if you'd like I am going to import mine that I have not updated since 2020 as you can see it did a great job at importing my resume it is missing some parts but that's that's because the formatting of my resume is quite complex but we can fix all that in just a few seconds it also gave my resume a score with a bunch of feedback on how to improve it we'll get to that in a bit but first let me clean this up a little bit also one cool feature here is that each section like your job title company dates location and responsibilities can be individually turned on or off okay now let's refresh the score and work towards improving it as you can see there are two recommendations for not using filler words and I'm going to remove both those adverbs the words eventually and round and see how that improves my score okay once the feedback is taken care of I can continue to address more feedback or add some of my latest work experiences since this resume is pretty out of date this was just a quick example of how beam jobs makes it super easy to create effective rums so if you're interested in trying them out visit the link in the description below thanks to beam jobs for sponsoring this video the final reason people let go is when entire teams or divisions get C now there could be various reasons why that may happen the team isn't profitable the incubation period has ended and the future projections are Bleak or because of an acquisition that results in um redundant resources in any case having some understanding of your business unit or cogs and Future Vision may come in handy here if you think that your leadership doesn't have a good direction or your org isn't making any profit or Worse leaking money it may be an indication that the entire team make it and this is where you probably expect me to say that the right thing to do is to probably jump ship to a different team while that is true it's also a double edged sword how will you know the detail business profile cogs and actual leadership direction of the new team you're trying to move over to no one that is trying to hire you will admit that their team isn't doing well right and if you could find that information so easily how come you didn't know about that on your current team when you interviewed with them by the time you join the new team and figure out the inner workings of that team what's to say that you will not end up in the same predicament again look I'm not advising not to move in such a case what I'm saying is that if you realize that your team has no Direction is leaking money or there are no signs of improvements uh you should think about moving in any case what does it have to do with layoffs it's not that you would stick around in a bad team with Bleak career prospects as long as you don't get laid off right so there's nothing different you do in this case as well whether there are layoffs or not so the whole point I'm trying to make with this video is that you have very little control over why layoffs happen what happens during layoffs and how it affects your headcut trying to play The Guessing Game only adds unneeded mental stress to you and your family without actually helping you in any meaningful way would you prepare differently for a job interview during a recession no you should always put your best foot forward regardless of the hiring situation and even if no one is hiring at all what can you really do you can't force them to open a job for you or change the entire economy by yourself or would you stop growing your skills because the economy is doing well no right you should always be doing that that's part of being a software engineer so my advice here is to stop worrying doing that just makes you a victim of what is called the loss aversion principle where your fear of losing is is much higher than the reward of winning so stop wasting your energy towards escaping layoffs instead focus in winning in life be curious and continue to expand your skills so that you're always valuable to anyone that needs your help your employer or otherwise work towards being financially independent so should something unfortunate happen you and your family are secure until you get your footing back on Solid Ground don't let things like layoffs that aren't under your control prevent you from living your life that's all I have to say let me know in the comments below if you want me to make a video about how to get financial Independence as a software engineer where I can cover the ideal order of investment for you how much to put into your 401K Roth backd door Roth Mega back door individual Investments real estate and things like that I'm not sure how much you guys are into that kind of stuff but if there's enough interest I can make a detailed guide for that so definitely let me know in the comments if you're interested and while at it check out some of these other videos that I think you may enjoy also like And subscribe that really helps out the channel I'll see you in the next one cheers

Channel: Engineering with Utsav

Views: 47,337

Keywords: software engineering, coding, developer, software engineer, programming, productivity, engineeringefficiency, entrepreneurship, leadership

Id: 44-iVv6Ymbo

Length: 13min 1sec (781 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 24 2024