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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.
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).
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 been a professional software developer for over 30 years. I've been laid off multiple times in that timespan. None of those layoffs phased me in the slightest, all of them were at least semi-expected because there were signs that the company I worked for was in financial trouble prior to the layoffs. It didn't feel the least bit personal, didn't damage my sense of self-worth and I always just found a new job, usually in a matter of days, so I also never felt the practical financial pinch.
But... I am less sure of that outcome repeating if I were to be laid off today given the combination of my age and the stagnant job market in tech.
If I got laid off tomorrow, it wouldn't impact my ego or self-worth just like prior layoffs didn't, but assuming the general extended-"Open to Work"-linkedin vibe of the past year or so is accurate I'd be a lot more concerned about the practical economic impacts than I ever was previously. I'm not living paycheck to paycheck, but as someone who has always enjoyed working at smaller companies rather than FAANG-type places I'm also not retire-whenever-I-want well off.
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.
This article is written for someone who doesn't need money.
Not wrong.
Everyone should consider, will you actually die? And - the converse - do you think you'll avoid death forever?
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!
- think? or
- believe?
or
- hope?
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.
So I think ageism is a thing. Or according to the commenters here, it can't be, and maybe you just didn't think of it the right way.
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.
Study after study after study shows more attractive people do better by the numbers in just about every single metric you can come up with. I imagine a recruiter may bristle at that as much as they would the racial bias that is also measurable in recruiting, since it would be the recruiter committing the bias. It's there in the numbers though.
1. Immune function: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8848230/ 2. hiring: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12383758/ 3. age: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38959815/ 4. wealth: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5558203/ 5. reputation: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4873083/
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.
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.
He reduced pay, the higher on the food chain you were, the bigger your cut. His cut was the biggest of all, and thanks to him, pretty much everybody at the company kept their jobs, and the company made it through while competitors folded.
That's what leadership looks like, and I can't tell you the kind of loyalty people had to him afterwards.
In my experience they're often used to get rid of high wage earners and people with benefits no longer offered by company. Those people then get replaced with new hires who get paid less and have fewer benefits.
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.
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.
Because they are old. Retirement age is close to the death, especially for men. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/life-expectancy.htm
That's mainly because people with poor health are forced into early retirement.
The Day I Realized Work Was Stealing My Life https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yw6tBaT0X4
It's almost like staking all of this to a single gameable resource is an issue.
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.
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.
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 don't help anyone avoiding conversation.
If I run out of interesting conversation starters, I default to weather/work/family and carry on.
I simply prefer to start with unique/contextual topics first.
"How do you know x?" is in fact much more common.
i live in a more laid back city now and i have friends where i still have no idea what they do for work
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.
When it's a job that's opaque to me, I like asking "What's a typical day for you like at work?"
Alternatives:
"What do you spend time on that you enjoy?"
"How or where did you meet 'x'?"
"What's the most interesting, counterintuitive thing you've learned recently?"
[Insert situational-led curious question here.]
That’s like going to the Olympic Village, among all the athletes, and being unable to understand why athletes ask each other “What’s your sport?” They are in the Olympics, man! They put everything into getting there. Ask them about their obsession, for crying out loud.
And ask me about how I am trying to make it in the world. I am happy to talk about it! Why aren’t you?
The people that say it about mundane things like asking what someone does for a living, know full well why people ask it.
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.
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?"
This wasn't true even for US few decades ago.
Jerry Seinfeld - MONEY became EVERYTHING
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7BgwUL_X75Y
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.
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.
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 %
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.