On Friday morning the week before last, I saw in the news that my former company Tesla had announced a 7% layoff: Elon Musk says he’s firing more than 3,000 Tesla staff because of pressure on profits and Model 3 production challenges. As a former employee, with many friends still at Tesla, everything Tesla does still catches my attention. It had only been seven months since the previous round, when 9% of employees were laid off last June (Tesla to lay off 9 percent of its workers).
I checked in with some of my friends at Tesla. Some were not affected, while others told me, dejected, that they had been laid off. My former boss is American, with a bachelor’s and a master’s in CS from the University of Michigan and many years of work experience before Tesla. He was extremely capable and managed our team well, and in the layoffs last June he was told he had to leave. His team would be taken over by another manager. Once the announcement was made, he put down his laptop, packed up his things right away, and was escorted out of the company.
A company is like a ship. The employees are the crew, sailing with the captain toward a destination. But not every ship can keep sailing smoothly forever. Sometimes the ship loses its direction and goes in circles. Sometimes the hull leaks, or the crew does not get along. If the problems never get solved, you may need to switch to another ship as soon as you can, or build your own ship and recruit your own crew.
Let me quote a passage on career development I read recently:
For a successful career, choices matter a great deal. What product you work on, and who you work with, matter more than burying yourself in overtime every day. One good choice can put you ten or twenty years ahead of your peers. One bad decision can waste years of a top talent’s prime.
In Is Winter Coming?, which I wrote last August, I wondered whether winter was coming. Looking back now: China’s economy is not doing well and many companies are laying people off. The US stock market fell at the end of the year and gave back all of last year’s gains. Some US companies are laying people off, while many tech companies such as Uber, Airbnb, Lyft, Pinterest, and Slack are all rushing to go public this year. It seems likely this year’s economy will not be as good as the past few years.
If your company’s cash flow is unstable, you might think about changing jobs before things get too bad, moving to a company with stable profits to ride out a possible economic crisis.
Many readers have asked me what I use to find jobs in the US. In a post I wrote earlier, Going on the Offensive: I Want to Find a Job. What Do People in the US Use to Find Jobs, and Which Platforms Give Me the Most Interview Chances?, I summarized the methods I know. In general, the best approach is to ask a friend at your target company to refer you internally. Most companies have dedicated people reviewing internal referrals, and compared with sending in a cold application on the company website and waiting indefinitely, a referral is the most efficient route.
Hired and TripleByte are the rising stars of the moment.
Hired flips traditional job hunting around: once you are accepted, you publish your profile, including your ideal annual salary, and interested companies bid on you with a position and a salary attached. If you are interested, you schedule the interview. At the time, because so many people wanted in, invited candidates got a bit of priority when joining.
TripleByte does not look at resumes at all. One screening quiz is enough: based on your performance, it matches you with ten or more companies, and you can often go straight to the final on-site interview, greatly shortening the time it takes to interview at many companies.
January 2019 is almost over. What new choices will you make this year?
This post was originally published on my former blog, 「半路出家軟體工程師在矽谷」, on January 28, 2019. The blog is now offline, and the full text is preserved by the Wayback Machine. It has been lightly edited for this site.
