It seems like a faint memory but back during the Great Financial Crisis, few people saw it coming let alone capitalized on it. You might know some of those people from the money The Big Short with Steve Carrell and Christian Bale. Those people they played are still around, managing money or prognosticating about the next crisis to happen.
Others you might know stopped short of predicting when it would happen but more about the directionality of the crash, notably the guy who wrote The Black Swan having said that mortgage giants were sitting on mountains of hidden risk akin to “sitting on a barrel of dynamite.” He wrote about that a year before things came tumbling down.
Now the same guy is coming out and saying this:
I don’t know what this means really. It’s easy to say this. But maybe it’s not easy to see the shape or magnitude of this impact. But if we look to some notably public companies for directionality including, most recently, META 0.00%↑ and HUBS 0.00%↑ you may perhaps come with some data points to add to Taleb’s view point.
Meta’s year-over-year reduction in staff is over 15%. In numbers around 12k people no longer working full time at the Menlo Park HQ’ed company.
This is the same with HubSpot which cut 7% of staff in the most recent quarter. Even if Taleb is entirely accurate in that it’s a generational change even at the very tech companies pumping out AI products, it’s just that the # of workers to sustain any organization is in deflation. I think we can all agree on this to some extent and with few exception.
Making the transition out of Tech shouldn’t be so hard. I’ve known many people including myself who have navigated the transition. Sometimes it’s an opportunity to — finally — do what you have a passion for, not even for less money, but perhaps crafting what is the most important and what aligns with your skills and values.
If you’re interested in finding that alignment as you transition into other roles in Tech or even out of Tech entirely, my practice in Career Transformation and Transition has been based on own lived experience as well from my Clients’ experiences.
Reach out for a free consult: