Like I said back on the first page, an experienced IT pro can weather this storm by incorporating and working on Corp to Corp contracts as a vendor or service provider. You will save the customer by lowering their payroll and related taxes and you will put more money in your pocket and free yourself from the whims of corporate management.
Maybe. Contractors are the typically the first to go though. The way you weather the storm is knowing you going to be in a storm in the first place. There is no sure fire way to ever avoid a layoff, cause you don't know what each individual company values, or why the layoffs even happen in the first place.
For example, as soon as the company I work for wants to save money, they pull out the list of contractors who work at the company, and they pull out them vendor support contracts and they say "what do these mufukkas do that we need to be paying them this money?"
"Secure Auth? We still use that? Wait, we got our own internal team that makes authentication software? Invite them to the next PI Planning meeting so we can get it on their Trello board for Q3. Let's go ahead and mark that Secure Auth contract termination for Q4." 185k saved right there and all I had to do was assign some work to a team I don't know shyt about.