Layoff Thinking

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.

The thing this doesn’t address is that we seem to be trying to make the idea of knowledge work obsolete, and having some success doing it. That’s what would be making me nervous. That there might not _be_ jobs in the future.

Internal assessment of self-worth is one thing. But one thing that I noticed while I was between jobs, was that the rest of the world was also built under the assumption that you "had a job".

Sign up for financial anything, they always ask you, which company you're with? What's your title? What's the range of your income?

I don't know if this is the case in the US, but in my country, I couldn't even open a brokerage account because the automated form required an office job. Entering freelancing or anything of some sort will get auto-rejected.

So it is in your face, all the time. And actually at that time I was fortunate enough not to have to worry about bills etc.

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!

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.

One of the biggest emotional triggers is unfairness. You can see this in anything with a brain from small animals, children through to adults. If there's perceived unfairness emotions are immediately and strongly triggered.

Layoffs are truly unfair. You have no control over them and no performance or ratings process is good enough to justify snap firings of some percentage. You're going to hit some of your hardest workers.

Honestly i don't think it's the self-worth or anything like that that gets to you. It's the sheer unfairness of the situation. I also think simply realizing this is helpful.

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 Western (American) society, we often place a great deal of our identity into what we do.

This is not only an American thing; any society where you spend the majority of your conscious time at work tightly couples employment with identity. In Spanish ¿A qué te dedicas? literally translates "to what are you dedicated?" but means "What do you do?", i.e. your job. to which you're dedicated.

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.

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.

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 saw laid off about 3 years ago and it was rough. I was unemployed for 6 months. This ended up being a wonderful experience, but it was a huge challenge to get through of many resumes sent out, many failed interviews, and even when an offer was presented then I had to achieve acceptance from the wife that did not want to relocate. There was a lot of continuous failure at trying to achieve something I no longer wanted to do and had grown out of.

Back then my entire career was as a fulltime JavaScript/TypeScript developer. I had really grown to hate it because the older I got the more childish it felt. I love the language and writing software in the language. I still write personal software in the language. Its the JavaScript employment I hated. I really detested the exceptionally low baseline employers kept lowering just to find employment. The result was ever more entitled and less capable peers.

Now I manage a large development team doing something wildly unrelated. I am so grateful for the pivot.

"What do you do?" and "How do you earn a living?" are different questions and it's on you if you confuse them.

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.

> great deal of our identity into what we do [...] establish our identity [...] taking away their national identity [...] re-center your sense of identity away from work

This obsession with "identity" (and its counterpart in the Bay Area, "prestige") is so utterly bizarre to me. I was fortunate to end up in relatively well-paying jobs at well-known tech companies, but I told my partner if someone offered me $900k per year to scrub toilets (with good work life balance and job stability), I'd happily switch to doing that instead.

I do feel like this identity-based perspective has some strong cultural influences. Certain regions of the world or U.S. seem to care a lot more about peer-perception than others. I grew up in an area of the U.S. that might be considered "working class oriented" and no one cared about credentials. The first thought after getting laid off or fired certainly would not be "what does this say about me?"

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.

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> 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 %