Former Reddit CEO has an advice for employees whose jobs are under threat

Former Reddit CEO and tech entrepreneur Yishan Wong has a simple advice for laid-off tech workers or who think that their jobs are in danger. Skill-up in AI. Even non-tech people can look at building a career in AI, he says.

“You don’t need an enormous amount of technical skill,” he told Fortune. “Non-technical people can build pretty valuable and novel applications on A.I. There’s this enormous amount of leverage that an individual can have,” he said.

Yishan Wong is currently the CEO of Terraformation, which he also founded. Earlier, he had served as the CEO of Reddit, Director of Engineering at Facebook and was part of the engineering team that led to the exponential growth of Paypal. Yishan is a computer science graduate from Carnegie Mellon University.


Yishan Wong himself not only had survived the dot-com bubble but also later thrived in his career.

According to a recent Bloomberg report, despite the softening of the IT job market in India, experts say that there’s a real shortage of data and AI talent.

There’s an “insatiable need for talent,” said Rahul Shah, co-founder of WalkWater Talent Advisors told Bloomberg. “AI can’t be outsourced, it’s core to the organization.”

According to a recent Nasscom report, there are about 416,000 people working in AI and data science in the country and there is immediate demand for another 213,000. The growth rate for the sector is estimated at about 20-25%. Further, AI is expected to contribute an additional $957 billion to India’s economy, by 2035.

India, according to Nasscom, is also expected to witness high growth in the demand for data science and AI professionals with an estimate of more than 1 million professionals by 2024.

"AI-led disruption in India's core sectors alone has a potential impact of $500 billion on India's economy in gross value added (GVA) terms by 2026. However, this cannot be achieved alone and would require concentrated efforts from the government, industry and academia to ramp up AI skilling and initiatives at scale," said Debjani Ghosh, President, Nasscom.