Dope, you want strategies for dealing with uncertainty? That's what we like to hear. There's a wealth of standard advice out there, but I can tell you the biggest three disparities between what I have gleaned from personal experience and what I see many others do:
1. Accept that nothing you care about in the future is truly certain. This may seem obvious, and it's good to plan ahead, but it seems like a lot of people get wrapped up in guarantees they think they have and panic when those guarantees don't pan out
2. Consider failsafes, contingencies, and alternatives an essential part of your planning. For example, even if you think your job is pretty stable, do you know what to do if you lose your job? Do you know where to look for jobs? Do you have a network of contacts in your industry? Do you have savings or investments that you can fall back on for your needs? Do you have friends who can help you? How much are you investing in skills, opportunities, assets that are unlikely to be valuable in other scenarios than the one you consider most likely?
3. Think in degrees and probabilities. When you're weighing the risk-reward of a plan that involves contingencies, you don't have infinite cognitive, financial, or temporal resources to devote to all of them, so you need to know what to care about. Even though failure to optimize a best case is often not as bad as failure to survive a worst case, sinking everything into worst-case planning for an unlikely scenario can still be worse than sinking everything into best-case planning for a likely one. Ask yourself: How bad is the worst outcome? How does it compare to the next-worst? The best? A different one that's equally good or bad? How likely do you think it is? How much do you have to prepare differently for it? What is the cost of that preparation?
My point is that the world will not give you guarantees. Yes I dislike big tech monopolies. I think it's apparent that concentration of power in tech as well as other sectors is a massive net harm to a lot of outcomes I care about, including the autonomy and privacy of individuals, the robustness of the economy to shocks, the capture of governments to privilege the needs of their industries over those of their citizens, and numerous more subtle latent effects it has on the social fabric of communities. That doesn't matter on the scale of individual choices though, and the point I have made was that if one is worried that the fortunes of these monstrosities will affect one's own career prospects, one should pursue strategies that do not rely on that not happening
I'm a pretty avid believer of Murphy's principles.
Your points above are definitely true, and I've been thinking hard about this myself for the past couple years.
My conclusion? I'm probably gonna keep my $300k+ FAANG job until the recession is over. That gives me more savings to fall back on in case something bad happens. It's ridiculous to suggest that it's a good idea to quit your job (or reject a high paying job) at the time when industry-wide layoffs are happening.
If your point is just about broader social responsibility and not fueling monopolies, you might have a point. But dealing with uncertainties on a personal level? Your advice about being prepared to lose your job and make sure to have enough savings and investments to fall back onto sounds a lot more reasonable than your initial toxic advice for people to reject a high paying stable-ish job at large corp right when the future is becoming uncertain.
When one makes two points that contradict each other, do they have two points or none?
As I have already explicitly clarified once in this reply chain, I am not talking about people who already have a job at one of these companies, or even people who already have gone through the interviewing process and have an offer in hand. I don't think it would even make sense for me to be talking about those situations in a thread that's talking about a possible hiring freeze, IE a decision within these companies to stop making new hires. I think it would be pretty foolish for an individual who already has a way to shore up their savings to give it up, and while sometimes making a foolish decision to take a principled stand on something can be admirable, I am not in the habit of demanding this of people
1. Accept that nothing you care about in the future is truly certain. This may seem obvious, and it's good to plan ahead, but it seems like a lot of people get wrapped up in guarantees they think they have and panic when those guarantees don't pan out
2. Consider failsafes, contingencies, and alternatives an essential part of your planning. For example, even if you think your job is pretty stable, do you know what to do if you lose your job? Do you know where to look for jobs? Do you have a network of contacts in your industry? Do you have savings or investments that you can fall back on for your needs? Do you have friends who can help you? How much are you investing in skills, opportunities, assets that are unlikely to be valuable in other scenarios than the one you consider most likely?
3. Think in degrees and probabilities. When you're weighing the risk-reward of a plan that involves contingencies, you don't have infinite cognitive, financial, or temporal resources to devote to all of them, so you need to know what to care about. Even though failure to optimize a best case is often not as bad as failure to survive a worst case, sinking everything into worst-case planning for an unlikely scenario can still be worse than sinking everything into best-case planning for a likely one. Ask yourself: How bad is the worst outcome? How does it compare to the next-worst? The best? A different one that's equally good or bad? How likely do you think it is? How much do you have to prepare differently for it? What is the cost of that preparation?
My point is that the world will not give you guarantees. Yes I dislike big tech monopolies. I think it's apparent that concentration of power in tech as well as other sectors is a massive net harm to a lot of outcomes I care about, including the autonomy and privacy of individuals, the robustness of the economy to shocks, the capture of governments to privilege the needs of their industries over those of their citizens, and numerous more subtle latent effects it has on the social fabric of communities. That doesn't matter on the scale of individual choices though, and the point I have made was that if one is worried that the fortunes of these monstrosities will affect one's own career prospects, one should pursue strategies that do not rely on that not happening