Austin Smith received the news shortly after walking into the office one morning in June. His employer, Netflix, was laying off about 300 employees. Smith, a data analyst in Salt Lake City, was one of them.
In a state of shock, Smith returned home to break the bad news to his wife. They got married in 2020 and bought a house together the following year. At 28, his life seemed so good, so safe-until suddenly it wasn’t. “What am I going to do now?” he wondered. “Will I be able to find something that is good for my career?”
The next morning, he started applying for every job he could find. Given the uncertainty of his future, the quest was far from pleasant. But he didn’t have to look for long. In August, he landed a position as a technical project manager at New Classrooms, a non-profit educational organization. After just a few weeks of unemployment, her career was back on track.
“I got lucky,” he says. “I hope that others who find themselves in a similar position are also as lucky.”
So far, it looks like they are. Even though the tech sector has been hit with massive layoffs this year — more than 140,000 workers since March, according to one count — the vast majority who have been laid off haven’t remained on the sidelines for long. According to an analysis of laid-off workers by Revelio Labs, a workforce data provider, 72% found new jobs within three months. Even more surprising, just over half of them got roles that actually paid. most than they earned in the jobs they lost.
The findings underscore how strong the job market remains, even in the face of a struggling technology sector. All too often, losing your job can be a major career setback—especially when tens of thousands of others in your profession are being laid off all around you. But this time around, it turns out, landing a pink slip might even, in many cases, provide a career. impulse. Amidst a wave of mass layoffs, many tech workers are bouncing back stronger than ever.
“The key takeaway is ‘don’t despair,'” says Reyhan Ayas, senior economist at Revelio Labs. “The job market is still hot. While some parts of the tech industry are struggling, other companies are actively hiring.”
Because tech workers are often college educated, with specialist skills in high demand across many industries, their chances of finding new jobs are pretty good in any economy. But now, those chances are unusually Good. Ayas and his colleagues analyzed the fate of laid-off tech workers by looking at data from Parachute and Layoffs.fyi, which compile information provided by unemployed workers. Economists estimate that 75% of tech workers who were laid off in October will eventually find a job within three months. This represents a 71% increase for those who were laid off in January of this year and 67% for those who lost their jobs in July 2021, when Silicon Valley was still in the midst of a hiring spree.
Revelio Labs also found that laid-off tech workers are doing much, much better in the current crisis than they did in the first few months of the pandemic. Back then, less than half were able to find new gigs within three months. That’s because in 2020, it wasn’t just technology that was going downhill – it was everyone. Over the course of two months, the economy lost over 20 million jobs.
Compare that with today. While technology companies are doing very poorly right now, many companies in other industries are doing well. And those other employers need a lot of coders, data scientists, and product managers — specialists that the tech industry was hoarding earlier. Economy-wide, the jobless rate last month was close to a 50-year low of 3.7%, which shortened the job search for everyone who was out of work. In November, the average unemployed person had been unemployed for 21 weeks – down from 32 weeks in June 2021.
Economists worry a lot about this number, because long periods of unemployment can inflict lasting damage on people’s careers and lives. The longer you are unemployed, the more outdated your skills become and the more likely you are to be passed over by recruiters and employers. That’s what happened after the Great Recession, when mass layoffs followed by a slow recovery made it difficult for many Americans to re-enter the workforce. And many of those who did find a job were forced to take a pay cut, putting them on a path of lower earnings for years.
Today, not only are laid-off tech workers finding jobs quickly, Revelio Labs found, but 52% are actually earning most than they were before. This shows the kind of salary new hires are capable of commanding in today’s job market. To attract job seekers, as I recently reported, employers are still being forced to offer wages 7% higher than what they pay their existing employees. It turns out that this wage premium for new hires applies not only to employees who leave their jobs voluntarily, but also to those who have been laid off.
That’s not to say that laid-off tech workers will continue to face great job prospects forever. November was a bloodbath for the tech industry, with giants like Meta and Amazon taking especially deep cuts. If layoffs continue, the economy will eventually become oversaturated with tech workers – at which point their job searches will take longer and more people will be forced to accept lower wages. But the data suggests we’re not quite there yet — at least not yet.
At present, the employment prospects of laid-off workers vary widely based on their occupation. Software engineers were especially lucky, Revelio Labs found, with 79% of those who lost their jobs since March getting new jobs within three months. Human resource specialists, on the other hand, had a harder time, with only 58% of them finding a new employer quickly.
One of the ways workers are navigating this variation is by being open to new opportunities. Revelio Labs found that nearly half of all laid-off workers who found new jobs took positions significantly different from the ones they held before. And 12% of them also moved.
“A lot of people are adapting to these changes quickly,” says Ayas. “That’s good news.”
Smith, a former Netflix employee, is one of those who have adapted. Previously in a hybrid position, it is now fully remote. He went from working for a tech giant to a much smaller nonprofit. And his day-to-day responsibilities have also changed a bit. He enjoyed the data analysis he was doing at Netflix, but found his new job in project management more rewarding — and more challenging. “It’s definitely more in line with what I’d rather spend my time doing,” he says. “But I also think I have a lot to learn.”
Aki Ito is a senior correspondent for Business Insider.