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How to make yourself layoff proof as a developer
There’s been a lot of news recently about the largest tech companies having massive layoffs. Twitter has fired over 3,700 of its staff. Meta 11,000. Amazon 10,000 and the list goes on. A lot of well-known people from the web development scene have come out and advised on what developers can do to either prevent themselves from being laid off or how to make money on the side so you’ll be okay if you do get laid off. I agree with some of their advice, but not all of it.
Despite the title of this article, I don’t think there’s anything a developer can really do to prevent themselves from getting laid off. If you’re one of the top 10 developers in the world working at an early-stage startup that can no longer secure funding and have to let everyone go. You’ll lose your job, or you can work for free but I don’t think many top-tier developers would want to do that. This is more of an extreme case but let’s not sugarcoat it. Yes, good developers are hard to hire and therefore are less likely to be fired, but in extreme scenarios like the one I mentioned above, you can lose your job. So the points I give in this article are to help reduce the chances of you getting laid off but not to prevent it altogether.
