The economy is a bit better \u2014 kind of, maybe, sort of? While things appear to be trending in the right direction, it\u2019s going to be a long road. Besides, if you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

I work in publishing and am well aware of the pain of being laid off \u2014 I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s not healthy, necessarily, but it\u2019s the thing we spend most of our time doing. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Now some good news: Companies are hiring. As an industry, robotics is somewhat uniquely positioned here, given the growth it saw during the pandemic. It\u2019s true that some big companies (Alphabet, Amazon) have slowed robotics investments. It\u2019s also true that we\u2019re going to see more companies get acquired or wind down.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t going away any time soon, nor is the drive to increasingly automate fields like fulfillment, construction, healthcare and agriculture, among others.<\/p>\n