It was the year 2000 and tech intern Yishan Wong, who later went on to lead online discussion site Reddit, was unknowingly experiencing the peak of the dotcom boom.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI was getting paid a huge amount of money at the time and I had three other offers for internships,\u201d Wong said in call with Fortune<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Just one year later, as Wong celebrated graduating in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University, some 200,000 jobs<\/a> were cut in Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n The dotcom bubble had burst. <\/p>\n \u201cEverything crashed,\u201d Wong said. \u201cThere are these huge layoffs every so often right? It\u2019s nothing new but it was my first time seeing the professional effects of a huge macroeconomic downturn.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Having landed a job at the then-start-up PayPal<\/a>, Wong watched a generation of tech workers get spat out by the industry.\u00a0<\/p>\n His early experience at Silicon Valley closely mirrors the headwinds at play today. Amid hundreds of thousands of layoffs<\/a> with more predicted to come<\/a>, many tech workers don\u2019t know how secure their roles are.<\/p>\n Yet not only did Wong survive the chopping board, he thrived.<\/p>\n During a period of upheaval Wong went on to join Facebook<\/a> in 2005, before taking the helm at Reddit in 2012\u2014and almost founded a WeWork rival in between.<\/a><\/p>\n Although Wong was \u201cpretty lucky\u201d to get his big break during the crash, he revealed two pieces of advice for tech workers in the current climate: Stop planning and get into A.I.\u00a0<\/p>\n Despite Goldman Sachs<\/a> predicting that 300 million jobs could be lost to artificial intelligence<\/a>, the development of large language models could also provide a lifeline to some, Wong insists.<\/p>\n \u201cIt feels like a hype train but actually there\u2019s an enormous amount of value overhang,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Even if Elon Musk, Apple<\/a> cofounder Steve Wozniak and thousands of other tech leaders manage to convince companies to hit pause on their A.I. developments<\/a>, Wong claims that a decade\u2019s worth of innovation has already been released in the past few months.<\/p>\n Instead of mulling over the likelihood of a layoff, Wong suggests candidates should look at side-stepping into A.I.<\/p>\n \u201cYou don\u2019t need an enormous amount of technical skill,\u201d he insists. \u201cNon-technical people can build pretty valuable and novel applications on A.I. There\u2019s this enormous amount of leverage that an individual can have.\u201d<\/p>\n Benjamin Franklin, Winston Churchill and many leaders have recited some variation of the phrase: \u201cFailing to plan is planning to fail\u201d.<\/p>\n It\u2019s why there\u2019s advice aplenty on how to plan every aspect of your career and land that dream role.\u00a0<\/p>\n But perhaps it\u2019s time to take a leaf out of Wong\u2019s book.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Instead of creating a five-year plan and giving himself an annual personal performance review to stay on track, he insists he \u201crandomly moved around\u201d in his career and worked \u201creally hard\u201d wherever he landed.<\/p>\n He believes that not focusing on where you want to go next makes you more grounded in the job you\u2019re actually doing\u2014instead of dreaming about the next big thing and scraping by in your current role with little energy. <\/p>\n \u201cIf you\u2019re really good at whatever you\u2019re doing right now it creates a foundation and gives you a lot of option power for whatever comes next,\u201d he says, while adding that it may even open up paths you would never have planned to take.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cMake sure you\u2019re really good at the time, wherever you are,\u201d he repeats. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter if you don\u2019t know what the music is going to be. If you\u2019re a good dancer, you can adapt.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Subscribe to Well Adjusted, our newsletter full of simple strategies to work smarter and live better, from the Fortune Well team. Sign up today<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\u00a01. Turn to A.I.<\/h2>\n
2. Stop career planning<\/h2>\n