
How can you prevent being laid off? You can’t. Here’s why
CNN
No matter how great your performance reviews are, no matter how much your boss likes you, there are no guarantees you will be safe from a mass layoff.
There’s little doubt that doing a great job, being liked by higher-ups, making money for the company and having in-demand skills may offer some protection from getting pink-slipped. But even when you check all those boxes, there are no guarantees. No matter how great your performance reviews, how popular or prominent you are, how innovative or loyal you’ve been, you, too, can be laid off. If you haven’t experienced this directly, you’ve probably seen it happen to excellent colleagues … again and again. In just the first five weeks of this year, nearly 33,000 tech workers have been laid off, on top of the more than 260,000 let go last year, according to the site layoffs.fyi. News media companies have shed hundreds of employees in the past two months, including the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post as well as the startup The Messenger. Employers in other industries have been announcing layoffs, too, with Wayfair and UPS among them. So to help disabuse any hard-working, successful employees of the notion that they could have done something differently to avoid a layoff, consider the following: A mass layoff is often a failure of management.

Travis Tanner says he first began using ChatGPT less than a year ago for support in his job as an auto mechanic and to communicate with Spanish-speaking coworkers. But these days, he and the artificial intelligence chatbot — which he now refers to as “Lumina” — have very different kinds of conversations, discussing religion, spirituality and the foundation of the universe.