How to win during current layoff wave

After explaining what caused layoff in 2022–2024, I offer 5 things to do to secure a seat in your tech job.

Raise Your Hand

Raise your hand, if you have to, fight for the opportunity to work on high visibility projects or revenue generating products.

Unless you screw it up badly as an individual, these are the team members that are less likely to get picked for layoff.

Yes, it will be stressful and you will need to put in a lot of additional hard work to meet the tight timeline and demanding requirements.

Have Good Relationship

Have a good relationship with your manager and your manager’s manager. If there is anyone who will defend you from layoff, it will be your manager.

Similarly, if there is anyone that will submit your name for layoff, it will also be your manager. Like it or not, this is how formal job authority works in organizations.

Your manager’s manager plays a role in reviewing and sometimes finalizing a layoff before going to HR. Your manager’s manager usually has some level of veto power to pull your name out if he/she has a good impression about your job performance.

Your manager provides the initial list (directly or indirectly), your manager’s manager has a bigger say in finalizing the list.

Work Extremely Hard

Work extremely hard to get yourself recognized as someone who goes the extra miles without the authority asking.

Not once in a while, but consistently beating the expectation to the point your stakeholders realize it without you promoting your work yourselves.

Not just working smarter but also harder.

Double your productivity.

Put in the hard work until not just your teammates realize it but also other teams notice it.

Get Sh*t Done

Between being a nice team mate who is collaborative who gets a reasonable amount of work done and being a difficult smart alec who delivers a lot of results, choose the latter.

There are no brownie points for being a nice person in layoff selection.

CEOs might talk about culture in all hands, I have never seen a positive person who promotes healthy culture escape a layoff.

However, I have seen countless very positive, high energy, collaborative, loyal employees that got laid off.

I don’t necessarily think this is good for work culture. I’m simply sharing what I saw worked and didn’t work.

Integrate AI into Your Work

I don’t care how. Find a way to integrate AI into your work.

Undeniably, AI cannot replace job 1–1 as of today but AI reduces a lot of work activities that require heavy time effort.

Human labour is to review and to connect the dots. The same scope of work that requires a 5-person team to complete it, will now only need 3-person team + AI to achieve the similar outcomes.

Those who cannot make use of AI to increase their productivity will be replaced by those who do.

You need to start practising to sharpen your skills in leveraging AI and keep up to date with what and how AI can help you complete your job faster and so that you have space to pick up the next tasks.

Stay strong in this tough climate.

Tough Times Never Last, But Tough People Do!