The stories in the New York Times article titled “Tech Layoffs Shock Young Workers. The Older People? Not So Much.” are humbling in so many ways.
It is important to study and understand how people always romanticize their relationship with their companies, and how many people replaced their individuality with their companies’ logos. The relationship between an employee and his/her employer is a trading transaction: your time and experience in exchange for money and a sense of usefulness to the society.
Where we work shouldn’t define us, our accomplishments should. We should stop entering a one-sided love affair with their place of work, because it is just crushing mentally and emotionally to wake up one day and discover it was ended so abruptly.
We should however strive to use our time working within a company to deliver high quality work, innovate, simplify, no matter what the domain of work is there is always a chance to produce work to be remembered with. It is the only guarantee to stay relevant.
Your work is your signature, it is your true identity, not where the work was done, but how it was done and how it lives on afterwards, your work is what distinguishes you from the next person. If you think about it like that, you have nothing to worry about, even if the current or the next eventual wave of layoffs includes you, your work will stay relevant and it will market your name much better than your company’s logo does.