
Income Loss Persists Long After Layoffs - gasull
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/us/04layoffs.html
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jpcx01
"The largest wage losses are typically for workers who had long tenures at
their previous companies."

A small justification maybe for my tendency to always be switching companies,
especially in the boom times. One, people are more likely to hire you when
employed. Two, you force yourself to get a broader experience that makes you
more valuable when times are tough.

Quit before you get fired

~~~
wlievens
> Quit before you get fired

That very much depends on your local laws. Getting fired can be very lucrative
in some locales.

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Elepsis
_Mr. Dettman, who was a business analyst and earned just over $50,000 after
nearly 20 years with Pratt_

Ouch.

I mean, I realize that Pratt & Whitney is not exactly a high-growth company,
but if after 20 years with one company you haven't managed to move up, either
in position or salary, maybe it's not surprising if it takes you four years to
find a new job.

~~~
teppefall
Many people never want to move up. They just want a good job, period. 50-60
year old people are like that.

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gaius
From the article:

 _About a year-and-a-half after being laid off, she found herself doing almost
exactly what she had done before, only this time for a Pratt contractor. She
now earns $80,000 a year.

Ms. Carron said she was not familiar with other programming languages that are
more broadly used, so she was lucky to have found a job working on the same
project._

This begs the question of what she was doing in those 18 months. Even after 18
months of not using Ada (I assume) she'd be pretty rusty. Surely of all the
professions mentioned, programmers have it easiest to update their skills.

~~~
teppefall
Seriously ? Dementia takes over after only 18 months ? She works in freaking
avionics. Ruby on Rails, .NET and Java developers should not comment on this
issue.

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larryfreeman
I am not sure that this is always correct. In my view, it really has to do
with the industry involved and the state of the economy.

I've been layed off twice and both years are my two highest income years. Both
lay offs occurred during a strong economy ('99 and '07) when tech jobs were
not too hard to get.

Once the economy gets better again (which looks like it's happening), the tech
market will come back and in my view, it should be stronger than ever. The big
kick off will probably be the Facebook IPO.

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queensnake
The computer programmers mentioned did all right though. Thank heaven.

