Recently, over 60,000 employees at major tech companies have lost their jobs. There have been tweets on Twitter from some 20-year-old staff at companies like Google and Microsoft talking about waking up on a random morning and receiving sack letters.
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Asides from them, a lot of other tech professionals, product managers and the like have also lost their jobs at these companies and it makes me shiver a bit at the prospect of any company employing someone with no job experience over a person who has worked at any of these big companies.
What I also find very interesting is the fact that even though over 60k people have lost their jobs, these companies have still retained over 70% of their employees. This means that these people who lost their jobs were more or less redundant staff who just needed to go so these companies could save some money in the current global drowning economy.
However, their place of work puts them way ahead of any underdog searching for the same job as they are. They're now unemployed competing for jobs alongside people who have never had jobs, making the entire process a thousand times harder.
During one of my mentorship sessions a couple of days back, I was told that I needed to do everything within my power to stand out. It's no longer an option. In order for a recruiter to even consider me worth their time when they have 5 or 10 applications from ex-Google employees, I need to be unforgettable.
This all makes me kind of terrified but I've comforted myself with the fact that there's a possibility that these ex-staff are not so great, hence why they got sacked. They're probably people who got employed based on referrals or some diversity shit. These are probably the staff we hear about who spend 2 months working on buttons.
I don't know how true this is but I took out some time to look at the portfolios of 2 of them and they're really not so great. However, they've worked at Google and I haven't so, they're generally better.
I don't know what my future in tech looks like but sometimes I feel like I got in at the wrong time and other times I feel like life just handed me a major trial and I need to put in a lot more work because my reward, in the end, won't be ordinary.
I don't see myself working for anyone or any company beyond 15 years from now. My goal for me is to work in every aspect of the tech industry that catches my fancy and maybe 5 years before I retire at 40, I start working on my own company. So, mentally, I'm already on the clock.
I'm trying hard not to just put out random portfolio content anymore. I'm beginning to realize that it's not just about the number of things I've worked on but also the quality so I'm working on one project until the end of February and then after that, I'll be editing a few other projects I have already done to make them a lot more presentable.
As always, wish me luck.
Hi, my name is Karina and I'm a Product Designer. I love to write about my design process and random cool ideas I have as they come. I'm also always job hunting and looking out for projects I can collaborate on so if you'd like to work on something together, you can contact me and also check out my portfolio;
Email: [email protected]
Portfolio: https://www.behance.net/karinalovet
Thanks for reading
