| There is no exact answer to this question, just a set of factors that contribute towards doing better than someone else. First, do you directly make money for a company, or directly reduce costs? The closer you are to core activities that generate income, or increase efficiency, then the more protected you will be from being laid off. This applies to companies too in a way. Companies need core services like email or ERP. Chat like Slack is now core compared to the situation in 2008. This core software is going to be the last thing that companies want to change. What they will focus on eliminating is all of the nice-to-have software that has been deployed in their organization. SaaS costs add up at the department and company levels and companies will look to eliminate low hanging fruit. If something has low usage numbers, that'll go. When some product has a nice UX, but there is an alternative within some other product, then the nice UX won't win out (e.g. use Jira instead of Asana.) These are examples of software, but the same patterns play out across other categories. What's worth considering, is how can these things come out of a recession? At the start of the recession, contingent staff or contractors were often let go before employees. As the economy recovered, hiring contractors was a safer bet during the uncertain window when it wasn't clear that we had turned a corner. SaaS started to become a viable option because you could get started cheaply and didn't have to stump up funds for implementation. We take SaaS for granted now, but a lot of the growth came out of the last recession when you could make arguments for it. |