> What are the safest industries in tech right now? If anyone knew what's safe then you'd see investor dollars pouring into those industries right now. At the

> What are the safest industries in tech right now? If anyone knew what's safe then you'd see investor dollars pouring into those industries right now. At the company level you'll have a much better chance of survival if your company makes a profit (which is frighteningly rare these days). But overall, during downturns, it's only possible to know what was safe when looking backwards. My experience, having entered the work force in the shadow of the dotcom bust, is that the best path to safety in tech is to be in the highest percentile of skill you can be. As boom periods extend more and more people flock to tech because of the money. If you were in industry pre-2008 you'll likely recall that most programmers in tech were in it because they had a passion for programming (especially in the growing startup scene at the time). Eventually we get to more recent years when you have boot camps just churning out mediocre devs. Things were very similar in the dotcom boom, and after it went bust there were many programmers who never went back to programming. And nearly everyone took pay cuts. One good thing that changes in crashes is people start looking for sincerely good and experienced people more and more. A seasoned dev, who during boom times is an annoying hire when you're just trying to drive up head count, becomes a valuable asset when you need just enough devs to get the job done. So depending on how bad this gets determines which percentile you need to be in to maximize your probability of keeping your career. A small correction just means the bottom 10% disappear, in more severe cases only the top X% might survive. The other thing that changes is that interviewing will become as challenging as it was for the previous cohorts lower percentile. For example if you're just above average getting a job in the future will feel more like a newbie programmer just out of a bootcamp, if you're in the top 10% and previously didn't have to try to get jobs, it's going to feel more like an average dev struggling with their first leetcode interview.