I don't know. When I was laid off, I had no questions about my identity or self worth. I knew it wasn't any fault of mine, the company was just failing because the business plan was bad.
My worry was how I was going to manage my budget, how long my savings would last, etc. It was 100% practical concerns. I didn't worry about my identity, I worried about my mortgage. I knew I had savings to last many months, but not savings to last many years.
My concerns could not be helped by taking time for hobbies or my kids. That wasn't going to pay my bills.
It seems strange to me that this article seems to imply that once you come to terms with being unemployed, your life will be fine. This is completely counter to my own, and I think most people's reality.
Following along with this, I find the real hits to self-worth post layoff are in the process of finding that next job. Even when you have a job, a serious job search can be exhausting and, depending on the feed back you're getting, really whittle away at self confidence.
But when you can feel the financial timer ticking, you continually start to question yourself and, dangerously, drop your standards. Desperation is a serious trap that can easily lead you to a situation where you are less likely to succeed (despite believing that dropping standards will increase you chances), leading to even further anxiety and insecurity. It's one thing to get rejected from a dream job, but getting rejected from something you internally think is beneath you really stings. Ironically I've found it's in desperate times that confidence and self respect is the most valuable. Clearly, this is much easier said then done.
For people with some financial buffer, you can afford the time to clear your head, and focus on finding something that will lead you to success. Without it, it's possible to have someone who could otherwise end up working for a place like Anthropic getting rejected from a small town startup offering half their previous pay (being a bit hyperbolic here, but I've seen situations like this narrowly avoided).
You are lucky. Some people, when laid off, struggle with all of the stress of not knowing how to pay bills that you do and on top of that struggle with a sense of lost self worth and other psychological pain.
I feel like a good chunk of that loss of self worth is caused by the struggle to pay bills? In other words, the psychological pain is a symptom of the economic pain.
I don’t think you can make much progress against the psychological pain unless you deal with the economic pain, and once you deal with the economic pain, the rest will go away.
I've heard plenty of anecdotes of people well off financially getting psychologically distressed after a layoff so I don't think it's purely financial.
Sure, I am certain there are some people who feel that way.
The person I was directly responding to was talking about people who faced both money worries and identity struggles. I think a good portion of those people are likely mostly being affected by the financial worries, and won't feel better until that is resolved.
I don't care about this identity thing at all. I only care about survival. If I am unemployed long enough in America, I will eventually die. I worry about not being able to pursue things that matter to me because I am going to die.
This article is written for someone who doesn't need money.
I’ve been in software development since 2003. I’d never been layed off until Jan 2024. I had some dodged several. The signs were all there, company acquired about a year before, product didn’t really fit in their vision. That’s when the layoffs usually happen, a year or so into it. Yet I was still surprised. They got me, they finally got me! At first I thought it was a blessing. I had changed jobs fairly regularly but I hadn’t had any time off aside from the usually week or so here and there for 20 years. I casually started leetcoding and applying. Nothing. My network finally came through after 3 months of time off. The vacation was nice but I was low key starting to worry.
The situation is even worse now. Personally I think there will be a rebound in hiring eventually. Wrangling ai if nothing else. Otherwise, Vernor Vinge once said long term technical unemployment would be a sign of the singularity; just pray for a soft take off!
> once said long term technical unemployment would be a sign of the singularity; just pray for a soft take off
I think that's true, but in your case (mine as well), companies just don't really want to hire older people. People get touchy when this is brought up, but young recruiter women aren't attracted to them and are biased, younger guys/interviewers view them as some dragon to be slayed to prove themselves, etc. When they say they want "experienced", they mean not so junior so as to be clueless, but not so experienced that you see through their company bullshit.
Having worked with a lot of recruiters, I promise -- promise! -- this is not a factor lol. Just because you find them attractive does not make the feeling mutual. They deal with enough shit from both management and engineers. They're friendly because of their job.
As a second knowledge bomb, the barista also does not find you charming.
Heck, we take it well, compared to Japan. They really identify with their jobs.
There's people that commit suicide, if they get laid off or fired. May not be as prevalent, as it was, a couple decades ago. At one time, execs also took enormous Responsibility and Accountability, for the performance of their companies. I feel as if American execs could learn a thing or two from them.
The worst punishment that you can get, at a Japanese company, is a "window seat." This is a "do-nothing" job, where you stare out the window all day. Many Americans would dream about that job.
For myself, I was laid off, after almost 27 years at a company. It sucked, but I knew it was coming, and was well-prepared.
I wasn't so prepared for the reception that I got from the tech industry, though.
As things turned out, once I got past all that stuff, it's been damn good. I still code every day, and regularly release apps; I just do it on my own, and have had to neck down my scope.
In my opinion that does not quite explain it completely. I recently read Mind over Grind by Guy Winch and he tries to explain it with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and that losing our job costs us security, social structure, status, accomplishment, as well as a sense of our identity.
When you look around or start talking to older folks you discover that retirement is often a traumatic transition, even when entered voluntarily. The loss of structure, frequent social interaction, and a sense of meaning can be really difficult. There are a lot of people who retire and die not long after because they sort of stop thriving in the absence of those things. It's particularly bad for men who relied on their career both for their self worth and their social interaction.
There’s a key distinction you’re intentionally ignoring with this comment… retirees don’t need the job they gave up to satisfy their pyramid. Employed people often do.
Retirees without a meaning outside of work don’t live long. They don’t need “a job”, but like every human, they need a reason to wake up in the morning. For lots of people (even retirees), that is/was a job.
Humans are very sensitive to being ostracized, and modern layoffs in aggregate are at least partially (~20%) intended and communicated as being ways to get rid of 'low performers', so we know that even when we get laidoff simply due to not making a cut line on a spreadsheet we still think it may be due to our own performance and also that others may think that as well.
vibe layoffs are bad practice due to fundamental attribution error (line managers don't necessarily have any idea who their low performers are even if they think they do) and ultimately expose the company to discrimination lawsuits if hr doesn't enforce a fair and consistent selection criteria
Why not? Same for hiring. People keep trying to impress order on a process that is ultimately, inherently chaotic, because of the reliance on disorderly human agents to carry it out.
Maybe if C-suite bros thought they might lose their golden geese to a coin flip, they'd think twice about instituting layoffs. Ironically, it would put a wall between "labor costs" (actual people with actual lives that are massively disrupted by job loss) and other costs, in terms of what can be excised from the balance sheet with an inconsiderate pen stroke.
I follow an informal rule of "never be the first person in a conversation to bring up work/career" (or weather, or family/kids).
If you play the rule like a game, it's kind of fun.
After starting with a personal trainer, I made it 10 sessions (10 hours) of small talk before he finally asked me something that led to a conversation about work.
It's a lot more challenging (but way more rewarding I find) to initiate conversation topics relevant to the context you're meeting the person in, and waiting for the other person to bring up the boilerplate conversation topics if it's important to them.
You can never get into any kind of detail with people from a different career path.
Like, "I'm a software engineer" is the most people understand. If I say "I write tests for the GPU factory to improve semiconductor yield and screen parts" then launch into something about product binning, there's only 1% of people who'll be interested. The typical marketing person or government bureaucrat won't care.
Meanwhile "how do you know x" launches into a story about 'x', a person we both know and care about. Then we can swap stories.
I love talking to people about their work, especially if it's a field I know nothing about. People spend eight hours a day doing something, they have a lot of knowledge about it.
When it's a job that's opaque to me, I like asking "What's a typical day for you like at work?"
What? I get so much joy out of learning the details of careers of people in different industries than me. I had an hourlong conversation with someone the other day who is in the high-end rug business…where he sources from, how he deals with difficult clientele, how he gets new leads, what it’s like visiting the remote villages where the rugs are made, etc. And another one with a hedge fund quant, and a separate one with a professional dancer. These are some of my favorite conversations to have with people.
There's another aspect this article doesn't mention that I think about a lot.
I've been on the same team for over a decade, as have many of my teammates. I've probably spent more time in the same room with some of these people than I have my wife and kids. We've shared hundreds of meals together, built things together, struggled together, traveled together, laughed, grieved.
In all meaningful senses of the word, they are my tribe.
And if one of us gets laid off, we're effectively forcibly ejected from the tribe by a complete stranger.
Yes, we can socialize outside of work too, and we do sometimes. But there is simply no replacement for the kind of connection you get from working on the same project together for hours a day every day.
A lot of times you realize that talking shop made much of your connection, or continuing the in-jokes from work. When you're out of the loop, it's no longer the same.
For me (years ago now) it was much more along the lines that I was what I do. Or 10%, maybe 20% of me was. And the money wasn't so critical anymore. 10 years in the tech industry with stocks going parabolic? I can retire if I want to. I will not lose the ability to care for my family in less than about 20 years. The question that needed answering was "how do I keep doing what I do despite the layoff?".
It was answered the moment it was legally able to be answered. In fact, due to a mixup on my part, it was answered 2 days before that point. Oh well, nobody cared.
> We are so conditioned to believe that we have no inherent worth in capitalism unless we are EARNING.
This is a fabulation, right. What kind of POS parent would instill self-worth on money and career into their kids?
Apart from being amoral and flawed at the core, it would often lead to mental issues since amount of people that like (not even love) their work is in low single digit %
> This is a fabulation, right. What kind of POS parent would instill self-worth on money and career into their kids?
They are not POS, they're trapped in systems and perspectives that push them to do this. Often they are the same kind of parent who had that instilled in them as kids and never had to self-examine those values or the systems that drove them.
If not a majority of parents, I'd guess a huge percentage fit this. It's a characteristic of the anxious middle class, some of whom still have the inter-generational memory of poverty. And yes, some of them are just that shallow but often it's a mix of both.
Ironically, the inclusion of career as a signal of self-worth is a relatively new and "progressive" change in the context of history, where in aristocratic or landlord-ruled societies, inherited or conquered (AKA stolen) wealth was primary signifier of self-worth.
In such societies, not having to work because of your wealth was the marker of honor and even moral superiority, to the point of being tautological.
Within the turbulence of recent technological advancements, we're now struggling to evolve to the next stage where self worth isn't attached to wealth or career, and we're potentially regressing.
The entire school system, even going through to University league tables (graduate employment/earnings), is geared around this. Everything is increasingly difficult for young people, and there's very little we can do to improve things for them.
I don't know. When I was laid off, I had no questions about my identity or self worth. I knew it wasn't any fault of mine, the company was just failing because the business plan was bad.
My worry was how I was going to manage my budget, how long my savings would last, etc. It was 100% practical concerns. I didn't worry about my identity, I worried about my mortgage. I knew I had savings to last many months, but not savings to last many years.
My concerns could not be helped by taking time for hobbies or my kids. That wasn't going to pay my bills.
It seems strange to me that this article seems to imply that once you come to terms with being unemployed, your life will be fine. This is completely counter to my own, and I think most people's reality.
Our primary concern is money, not self image.
Following along with this, I find the real hits to self-worth post layoff are in the process of finding that next job. Even when you have a job, a serious job search can be exhausting and, depending on the feed back you're getting, really whittle away at self confidence.
But when you can feel the financial timer ticking, you continually start to question yourself and, dangerously, drop your standards. Desperation is a serious trap that can easily lead you to a situation where you are less likely to succeed (despite believing that dropping standards will increase you chances), leading to even further anxiety and insecurity. It's one thing to get rejected from a dream job, but getting rejected from something you internally think is beneath you really stings. Ironically I've found it's in desperate times that confidence and self respect is the most valuable. Clearly, this is much easier said then done.
For people with some financial buffer, you can afford the time to clear your head, and focus on finding something that will lead you to success. Without it, it's possible to have someone who could otherwise end up working for a place like Anthropic getting rejected from a small town startup offering half their previous pay (being a bit hyperbolic here, but I've seen situations like this narrowly avoided).
It certainly can be both, no? It was for me at least
You are lucky. Some people, when laid off, struggle with all of the stress of not knowing how to pay bills that you do and on top of that struggle with a sense of lost self worth and other psychological pain.
I feel like a good chunk of that loss of self worth is caused by the struggle to pay bills? In other words, the psychological pain is a symptom of the economic pain.
I don’t think you can make much progress against the psychological pain unless you deal with the economic pain, and once you deal with the economic pain, the rest will go away.
I've heard plenty of anecdotes of people well off financially getting psychologically distressed after a layoff so I don't think it's purely financial.
Sure, I am certain there are some people who feel that way.
The person I was directly responding to was talking about people who faced both money worries and identity struggles. I think a good portion of those people are likely mostly being affected by the financial worries, and won't feel better until that is resolved.
It's not really "lucky" to have a sense of identity outside of work. The opposite is just unhealthy, even if common.
I don't care about this identity thing at all. I only care about survival. If I am unemployed long enough in America, I will eventually die. I worry about not being able to pursue things that matter to me because I am going to die.
This article is written for someone who doesn't need money.
I’ve been in software development since 2003. I’d never been layed off until Jan 2024. I had some dodged several. The signs were all there, company acquired about a year before, product didn’t really fit in their vision. That’s when the layoffs usually happen, a year or so into it. Yet I was still surprised. They got me, they finally got me! At first I thought it was a blessing. I had changed jobs fairly regularly but I hadn’t had any time off aside from the usually week or so here and there for 20 years. I casually started leetcoding and applying. Nothing. My network finally came through after 3 months of time off. The vacation was nice but I was low key starting to worry.
The situation is even worse now. Personally I think there will be a rebound in hiring eventually. Wrangling ai if nothing else. Otherwise, Vernor Vinge once said long term technical unemployment would be a sign of the singularity; just pray for a soft take off!
> Personally I think
- think? or
- believe?
or
- hope?
> once said long term technical unemployment would be a sign of the singularity; just pray for a soft take off
I think that's true, but in your case (mine as well), companies just don't really want to hire older people. People get touchy when this is brought up, but young recruiter women aren't attracted to them and are biased, younger guys/interviewers view them as some dragon to be slayed to prove themselves, etc. When they say they want "experienced", they mean not so junior so as to be clueless, but not so experienced that you see through their company bullshit.
I'm pretty sure any recruiter's primary motivation is to find a fit for the role so they can get their commission.
> young recruiter women aren't attracted to them
Having worked with a lot of recruiters, I promise -- promise! -- this is not a factor lol. Just because you find them attractive does not make the feeling mutual. They deal with enough shit from both management and engineers. They're friendly because of their job.
As a second knowledge bomb, the barista also does not find you charming.
Heck, we take it well, compared to Japan. They really identify with their jobs.
There's people that commit suicide, if they get laid off or fired. May not be as prevalent, as it was, a couple decades ago. At one time, execs also took enormous Responsibility and Accountability, for the performance of their companies. I feel as if American execs could learn a thing or two from them.
The worst punishment that you can get, at a Japanese company, is a "window seat." This is a "do-nothing" job, where you stare out the window all day. Many Americans would dream about that job.
For myself, I was laid off, after almost 27 years at a company. It sucked, but I knew it was coming, and was well-prepared.
I wasn't so prepared for the reception that I got from the tech industry, though.
As things turned out, once I got past all that stuff, it's been damn good. I still code every day, and regularly release apps; I just do it on my own, and have had to neck down my scope.
"What do you do?" and "How do you earn a living?" are different questions and it's on you if you confuse them.
In my opinion that does not quite explain it completely. I recently read Mind over Grind by Guy Winch and he tries to explain it with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and that losing our job costs us security, social structure, status, accomplishment, as well as a sense of our identity.
I suspect most retirees would disagree.
Many would disagree but many would disagree.
When you look around or start talking to older folks you discover that retirement is often a traumatic transition, even when entered voluntarily. The loss of structure, frequent social interaction, and a sense of meaning can be really difficult. There are a lot of people who retire and die not long after because they sort of stop thriving in the absence of those things. It's particularly bad for men who relied on their career both for their self worth and their social interaction.
There’s a key distinction you’re intentionally ignoring with this comment… retirees don’t need the job they gave up to satisfy their pyramid. Employed people often do.
Retirees without a meaning outside of work don’t live long. They don’t need “a job”, but like every human, they need a reason to wake up in the morning. For lots of people (even retirees), that is/was a job.
> security, social structure, status, accomplishment, as well as a sense of our identity.
It's almost like staking all of this to a single gameable resource is an issue.
Humans are very sensitive to being ostracized, and modern layoffs in aggregate are at least partially (~20%) intended and communicated as being ways to get rid of 'low performers', so we know that even when we get laidoff simply due to not making a cut line on a spreadsheet we still think it may be due to our own performance and also that others may think that as well.
vibe layoffs are bad practice due to fundamental attribution error (line managers don't necessarily have any idea who their low performers are even if they think they do) and ultimately expose the company to discrimination lawsuits if hr doesn't enforce a fair and consistent selection criteria
So what do you recommend instead, a dice roll?
Why not? Same for hiring. People keep trying to impress order on a process that is ultimately, inherently chaotic, because of the reliance on disorderly human agents to carry it out.
Maybe if C-suite bros thought they might lose their golden geese to a coin flip, they'd think twice about instituting layoffs. Ironically, it would put a wall between "labor costs" (actual people with actual lives that are massively disrupted by job loss) and other costs, in terms of what can be excised from the balance sheet with an inconsiderate pen stroke.
I don't understand the American "what do you do?" as first introduction.
It's more fun to ask "how do you know 'x'" where 'x' is the host of the party or event or whatever. Although I'm Canadian.
I follow an informal rule of "never be the first person in a conversation to bring up work/career" (or weather, or family/kids).
If you play the rule like a game, it's kind of fun.
After starting with a personal trainer, I made it 10 sessions (10 hours) of small talk before he finally asked me something that led to a conversation about work.
It's a lot more challenging (but way more rewarding I find) to initiate conversation topics relevant to the context you're meeting the person in, and waiting for the other person to bring up the boilerplate conversation topics if it's important to them.
"What you do" seems more sympathetic than "who you are" and "who you know". American culture might be more meritocratic at a basic level.
I would say it's pretty rare to hear, "What do you do?" as a first introduction in the wild in America.
"How do you know x?" is in fact much more common.
What about it don’t you understand?
You can never get into any kind of detail with people from a different career path.
Like, "I'm a software engineer" is the most people understand. If I say "I write tests for the GPU factory to improve semiconductor yield and screen parts" then launch into something about product binning, there's only 1% of people who'll be interested. The typical marketing person or government bureaucrat won't care.
Meanwhile "how do you know x" launches into a story about 'x', a person we both know and care about. Then we can swap stories.
I love talking to people about their work, especially if it's a field I know nothing about. People spend eight hours a day doing something, they have a lot of knowledge about it.
When it's a job that's opaque to me, I like asking "What's a typical day for you like at work?"
What? I get so much joy out of learning the details of careers of people in different industries than me. I had an hourlong conversation with someone the other day who is in the high-end rug business…where he sources from, how he deals with difficult clientele, how he gets new leads, what it’s like visiting the remote villages where the rugs are made, etc. And another one with a hedge fund quant, and a separate one with a professional dancer. These are some of my favorite conversations to have with people.
There's another aspect this article doesn't mention that I think about a lot.
I've been on the same team for over a decade, as have many of my teammates. I've probably spent more time in the same room with some of these people than I have my wife and kids. We've shared hundreds of meals together, built things together, struggled together, traveled together, laughed, grieved.
In all meaningful senses of the word, they are my tribe.
And if one of us gets laid off, we're effectively forcibly ejected from the tribe by a complete stranger.
Yes, we can socialize outside of work too, and we do sometimes. But there is simply no replacement for the kind of connection you get from working on the same project together for hours a day every day.
A lot of times you realize that talking shop made much of your connection, or continuing the in-jokes from work. When you're out of the loop, it's no longer the same.
For me (years ago now) it was much more along the lines that I was what I do. Or 10%, maybe 20% of me was. And the money wasn't so critical anymore. 10 years in the tech industry with stocks going parabolic? I can retire if I want to. I will not lose the ability to care for my family in less than about 20 years. The question that needed answering was "how do I keep doing what I do despite the layoff?".
It was answered the moment it was legally able to be answered. In fact, due to a mixup on my part, it was answered 2 days before that point. Oh well, nobody cared.
> We are so conditioned to believe that we have no inherent worth in capitalism unless we are EARNING.
This is a fabulation, right. What kind of POS parent would instill self-worth on money and career into their kids?
Apart from being amoral and flawed at the core, it would often lead to mental issues since amount of people that like (not even love) their work is in low single digit %
> This is a fabulation, right. What kind of POS parent would instill self-worth on money and career into their kids?
They are not POS, they're trapped in systems and perspectives that push them to do this. Often they are the same kind of parent who had that instilled in them as kids and never had to self-examine those values or the systems that drove them.
If not a majority of parents, I'd guess a huge percentage fit this. It's a characteristic of the anxious middle class, some of whom still have the inter-generational memory of poverty. And yes, some of them are just that shallow but often it's a mix of both.
Ironically, the inclusion of career as a signal of self-worth is a relatively new and "progressive" change in the context of history, where in aristocratic or landlord-ruled societies, inherited or conquered (AKA stolen) wealth was primary signifier of self-worth.
In such societies, not having to work because of your wealth was the marker of honor and even moral superiority, to the point of being tautological.
Within the turbulence of recent technological advancements, we're now struggling to evolve to the next stage where self worth isn't attached to wealth or career, and we're potentially regressing.
The entire school system, even going through to University league tables (graduate employment/earnings), is geared around this. Everything is increasingly difficult for young people, and there's very little we can do to improve things for them.
People do not absorb culture only from their parents.