The economy is a bit better — kind of, maybe, sort of? While things appear to be trending in the right direction, it’s going to be a long road. Besides, if you’re unable to find work, positive macroeconomic trends are cold comfort. One of the nice things about having a platform like TechCrunch is the opportunity to help people in that difficult position.
I work in publishing and am well aware of the pain of being laid off — I’ve been through the process twice. A million strangers on LinkedIn can tell you how great you are and how none of this is any of your fault. You can also know these things to be implicitly true and still struggle with questions of self-worth.
Here in the U.S., your occupation is invariably the second thing people ask you about after getting your name. We invest so much of our identity in what we do. It’s not healthy, necessarily, but it’s the thing we spend most of our time doing. It’s also the foundation of many of our closest relationships. It can be easy to lose sight of the human toll of mass layoffs when we see numbers in the tens of thousands among tech giants.
But a lot of money was infused into automation, providing runways that will help many get out on the other side in one piece. If anything, a lot of this bad news will only serve to bolster the industry. Certainly, labor issues aren’t going away any time soon, nor is the drive to increasingly automate fields like fulfillment, construction, healthcare and agriculture, among others.
Simply put: It’s a bad time to be looking for jobs, but a good time to be looking for jobs in robotics. I’ve been featuring a handful of companies that are hiring in my weekly robotics newsletter, Actuator. This morning, however, I put out a call in hopes of getting enough together for a standalone post. I didn’t have to wait long.