Dan Springer is the dude who captained DocuSign's ship from 2017 to 2022. Now chilling as a fancy (and no doubt highly paid) advisor, he's spilling the beans on how to layoff-proof your career with two key tips. It's basically "Survivor: Silicon Valley Edition," where the prize is keeping your desk job!
Here are Five Fast Facts on making yourself layoff-proof (at least as much as you can):
- 📱 Skill-Up or Shut-Up - Springer advises you to invest in your own capabilities, and as new technologies come along, embrace them. Just ask a BlackBerry user, who laughed at the 2007 iPhone and ended up as a tech dinosaur just a couple years later, clutching their keyboard phone in a swipe-right world.
- ♥️ Hustle Heartthrob - To be "most employable," crank up the commitment! Commit to the company and constantly apply yourself to make your company successful. Bosses love "culture builders" who treat customers like VIPs, not spam emails.
- 📈 DocuSign Boom Time - This philosophy worked for DocuSign. Under Springer's watch, the team ballooned from a cozy 2,255 employees in January 2018 to a massive 7,461 by January 2022! That's like your school chess club exploding from a lunch table to taking up the whole cafeteria!
- 📉 Post-Boss Purge Party - After Springer left in June 2022, DocuSign went layoff loco, as they axed nearly 700 peeps (9% of the company) in September 2022, another 700 (10%) in February 2023, and 440 more (6%) in February 2024, leaving 6,838 survivors as of January 2025. Apparently a lot of people didn't invest in themselves or lacked commitment.
- 🤯 Tech's Pink-Slip Parade - The industry's a bloodbath overall right now - Microsoft zapped 9,000 jobs (4% of staff) in July 2025 after 6,000 in May; Meta slashed 10,000 in March 2023 on top of 11,000 in November 2022; and AI whiz Dario Amodei warns robots could gobble up 50% of entry-level office gigs in the next five years, turning cubicles into ghost towns.
🔥Bottom line: Given all of this, anything you can do to make yourself as layoff-proof as possible is a worthy endeavor! Your wallet will thank you for sure. Geek out on gadgets and grind with glee, or risk joining the unemployment conga line. Gear up, future-proof fam; the bots are coming, but you're the boss of your own reboot, and you can protect yourself with the right habits!
What other layoff-proofing tips would you add?
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