[Taro Classic] Survive Tech Layoffs As An Engineer
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This course provides a clear, grounded guide to understanding layoffs in the tech industry and navigating them without panic or self-blame. We explain why layoffs happen, how macroeconomic forces and company decisions shape outcomes, and why layoff selection often feels random from an individual contributor’s perspective.
We then focus on what we can control: choosing financially healthy companies and high-impact teams, optimizing performance, building strong relationships, and developing durable, transferable skills that outlast any single role or tech stack. Finally, we cover how to respond if a layoff happens—handling severance and finances, leveraging brand and domain advantages in the job search, building support networks, and using the forced pause to reflect and intentionally choose what comes next.
By the end of the course, we walk away with a realistic mental model of layoffs, a practical playbook for reducing risk, and a resilient mindset for turning uncertainty into long-term career strength.
Alex Chiou and Rahul Pandey are good at interviewing, but a lot of their career success actually comes from being consistently excellent in performance reviews, especially at Meta (which is one of the toughest tech companies to perform at).
Alex Chiou: Across his ~4 years at Meta, Alex got an "Exceeds Expectations" rating or higher every single half. In fact, Alex has never gotten a below average performance rating across his entire career. Alex then took the learnings from his personal success to mentor dozens of engineers to lightning fast promotions at Meta, increasing their compensation from ~$200k to $500k+ in just 3 years. It got to the point where he could perfectly predict which rating his mentees would get.
Rahul Pandey: Rahul has always been a star performer, getting all the way to Staff [E6] at Meta. Rahul actually was one of very few engineers at Meta to get DE, which is Discretionary Equity (i.e. a huge chunk of RSUs). DE is a massive performance bonus only given to the top engineers who operate within the Top 5%. Rahul's DE reward was a huge reason behind his meteoric rise to $800k+ TC.
