I had just started working at a large financial services company shortly before the financial meltdown in '07-08.
Leadership held an all-hands meeting letting people know that layoffs were coming, and the VP of each person's respective area would walk over to their desk to inform them personally.
On the day of the layoffs, you could feel the stress in the air. Not much smiling, except the forced kind after someone tries to break the tension with a joke.
And then, a door at the end of a row of cubes opens and your VP walks into the area. Everyone wonders if they're the one (they've been wondering since they learned of the layoff, but something changes when the agent of termination literally walks through the door). She walks down your row, nearing your desk, and your heart starts pounding. She keeps walking, and you breathe a sigh of relief. You peek over the edge of your cube to see her talking to Joe, and a few minutes later he is escorted from the premises.
A few minutes later, she walks into the area again, and the cycle of stress repeats.
I survived the cut, but the experience still sits with me. I don't remember much about any specific day during my next half-decade there, but I remember that day like it was yesterday.
I know some of the recent layoffs have been handled terribly, but I never again want to be sitting in my cube, wondering if I'm next every time the door down the hallway opens.
The "escorting" strikes me as the worst part. I understand completely if the person is being fired under bad terms. But laid off? That just undermines everything: "Hey, Joe. You've done great work here, and you know that it's just the nature of the business that your unit simply can't be supported. It pains me so much to have to do this, and we hope you'll keep us in mind when things turn around: we'd hire you back in a second. Also, I don't entirely trust that you're decent enough to exit with dignity and not to go ape ** and destroy/vandalize/steal valuable company property. Good luck out there ... as soon as you leave the premises, that is."
The thing is, you never know how a person is going to react to this news. Some are dejected. Some angry. Some vengeful. All it takes is one bad actor to set the rule for the company forever.
It’s optimistic that everyone would act rationally and in good faith. I wish it were that way.
Incidentally I recall a coworker quitting quite colorfully blasting some music from his phone and loudly declaring goodbyes to people. Our head of security was following him around half-anxious, half-annoyed.
For my recent layoff from a 100% remote role at a well known BigTech co, I was in the midst of a meeting and was abruptly signed out of my laptop and presented with a screen saying it had been frozen and prompting for a 6 digit passcode to unlock it. I had no idea what was going on and began calling IT support to get back in so I could let coworkers on my team know I was completely unable to do anything. They evidently hadn't been informed either as they actually gave me the passcode! I put two and two together when I got back in and was still locked out of everything, and a friend in a personal non-work Slack @'d me with the headline that my company was doing layoffs.
I hated the job and was ready to start looking for a new one once annual bonuses were paid this month, and the severance package is more than my bonus would have been, so it may all work out for the better.
There are so many better ways to do layoffs, you have to assume they pick the cruel ways on purpose. It's not like these companies are inventing layoffs and figuring out on their own how to do it.
> “This whole concept of working from anywhere went too far,” Mr. Ulbrich said. “I’m all into flexibility and all supportive that work and life has to find a flexible kind of partnership…but that doesn’t translate into, ‘Mondays and Fridays, I always work from home.’ ”
> He added: “I think the recent trends, the layoffs, will help to bring a little bit of balance into that.”
And frankly, people have come up with a lot more cruel things to do to other human beings than just dismissing them in a deliberately humiliating way.
Imagine a tech couple earning >$400k, combined income after tax about 20k a month. Awesome right?
Now they need a house with square footage for kids to play and sleep, a home office, and close enough to downtown to maximize family time.
That housing runs at least 5k/mo. A nanny is another 5k. Add in food, bills, transportation, a few yearly trips to see grandma, another 5k.
Said couple might be saving 50k/year. Great! And after a few frugal years together that makes a 10-20% home down payment and they can start their family.
But even though they're both well paid, they're really twice as vulnerable. Either one losing their job puts them at a rapid household burn rate.
Something will have to give. The Nanny loses their job, trapping one parent into a caregiving role. Or they can no longer afford flights to see family. Etc.
I think you are rounding up a bit with those numbers... anyway, when I look around where I live I see people are just outright mismanaging their money with frivolous luxury items, very expensive cars, etc., for... what reason? To maintain an image? I'm not sure exactly. But I think an honest account would have to say that it's not just how hard it is to live (if it was what about the vast majority of people who aren't making that kind of money and do have a family, are they wizards?).
Nothing’s ‘wrong’ with it but it does make it hard to empathise with someone who subjects themselves to that lifestyle then worries about being laid off.
From some people’s perspective a pricey depreciating car just represents a choice to shorten your runway if things go wrong.
Well, a few things. First, the premise that luxury items have more utility is one that doesn't always hold up (unless we count, as Veblen does, advertising a higher place in the social hierarchy through the things we own as a form of utility but I think this is dubious in a spiritual sense). Second, I think the joy of owning each individual fine item is lessened by buying many of them indiscriminately. Third, the financial stress I see this put on people -- difficulty, despite high income, paying basic bills or building any kind of savings -- cannot possibly be offset by that.
> what about the vast majority of people who aren't making that kind of money and do have a family, are they wizards?
I have a large extended family who all make far less than me. Yes, they have plenty of kids, too.
Their secret is living outside of a tech hub, and near family. It takes a village to raise a child. Their village is free, mine isn't.
> when I look around where I live I see people are just outright mismanaging their money with frivolous luxury items
No offense, but you're either a robot or a sociopath. "Frivolity" is often what motivates humans to get out of bed and go to work, rather than sink into something like substance abuse.
I, personally, budget about $10k/y for motorcycles and art, which are definitely frivolous personal pleasures that don't directly benefit my family. Except it brings me joy, and who knows how productive or alive I'd be without it.
OK sure I’m a sociopath for not buying a Mercedes and an Hermes handbag for my wife. And guess what lots of people live even in expensive cities without making $400k. Go look up median incomes in major cities. You’ll be surprised.
A luxury car or bag doesn't move the needle much, both can also be had for 10k/y. And both of those items hold some value in the event they'd need to be resold. They're far less "frivolous" than something like a nice vacation.
Hoard your treasure in a cave like a dragon if you choose, but spitting on others for finding a different balance is definitely unempathetic.
I'm sorry but if your income is well into the six figures there's a lot of room between "hoarding" your money and never spending any on anything fun and spending it so freely that you create unnecessary financial distress for yourself. If you think 20 grand a year is "nothing" then I guess you're not so bad off after all.
Yes. Recall my original point is explaining how high earners can still be anxious about layoffs. Even if they have been balancing family, fun, and savings... a layoff would likely mean 6-24 months of job searching. We would survive, but as those months go on, we'd have to make deeper and more painful cuts our lifestyle.
We are very privileged to have the money for a nanny. Having to let go of a wonderful employee and friend is itself worth plenty of anxiety.
And we're lucky enough to be citizens. Plenty of folks in our situation aren't.
People should live within their means. That means not spending so much of their income that being unemployed for a few months threatens their entire lifestyle.
Means don’t care about home repair, particularly foundation repair, new windows to remove draftiness, and siding repair all hitting around the same time, draining your savings right when layoffs start occurring.
We do quite well, living well within our means, allowing us to be able to cover these types of big once-in-a-home owner’s lifetime surprises, but a layoff could mean we’re simply making the place nice for the next folks while we bail out to find something new.
Life ain’t cheap and the social safety net has been used and abused to the point bad timing can destroy everything you’ve worked for with one unexpected meeting with HR on some random Tuesday.
People are not afraid of losing the job. People are afraid that the job they will get next will be much worse (in pay, in conditions, in work etc.)
$200-300k is not normal in the US and if you are getting fired from one of the few firms paying that much you might have some elevated anxiety that it will take a lot of effort to find another job with such a pay and perks.
But if you are a part of a massive layoff and you read that other such firms are going through layoffs too then you are really afraid that you might not be able to get an equivalent job in the near future as your former colleagues will be competing with you for the reduced number of these high-paying jobs left.
I have a disability in which stable access to healthcare is extremely important. Due to the way healthcare works in this country, switching a job means switching the company that provides my healthcare. This new company can declare that I haven't had enough evidence to prove my healthcare needs and decline to continue my regimen, which worsens my disability and risks my continued employment.
Yeah it's hard to generalize, but as someone who tries to live within our means - in good times people think you're cheap or not doing well, in bad times they think you're some privileged ass because you're not in debt or in trouble like they are.
Yep. Even if your basic needs are met, there’s always conspicuous consumption and lifestyle creep to eat into the remainder.
This is what is really dangerous about remote work to the status quo: if I take a SWE salary to a low CoL area, I don’t have the same pressure to burn through it like in a tech hub. I can live comfortably compared to my neighbours and still save. This gives big business far less leverage.
Those salaries are a new experience to a lot of people. In some cases, because they came out of school into them and have little experience with financial management in the first place, and in other cases because the prior benchmark for tech industry was like 30-50% of that until fairly recent (and remains that way at many US tech companies).
And like with a lot of "new money" experiences, the answer to your question is: no. You get excited to taste a luxury lifestyle and get carried away buying an dangerously expensive house because it fits your Peleton and your bank says you're good for it. With this being your first time through a tech boom, you didn't believe the old cynics telling you there was a second act coming. But now you might get laid off and have $15,000 per month in bills to pay lest that house go back to the bank.
It's an understandable story, and a tragic one. :(
In addition to the other responses, two major factors for me:
1. At the time, I wasn’t making anywhere close to that salary. The tech job market in my region at the time didn’t pay anywhere close to SV salaries, and even less as someone working tech at a non-tech company.
2. I only had a few years of decent earnings at that point, and was funneling most extra funds into debt.
Having enough savings to quit for a few years is amazing, but a privilege that few people have.
> In from the UK and earn about a quarter as much and I could be unemployed for several years before I had to start caring.
Luckily you live in a still mostly civilized society, where you don't lose your health care when you lose your job, and you have a decent welfare program so you don't lose your house and can still eat.
We don't have that here. Also, in the Bay Area, $300K will barely get you by if you bought a house in the last five years.
Planning ahead for unexpected problems isn't that common. Even planning ahead for expected cyclical income is something people have had issues with at least since the time of Aesop.
So Stanley’s characters was walking out with a USB drive of d@mining evidence about the coming collapse of the company?
It may not have been proprietary, but it does speak to why they walk people out under guard. Maybe he had good intent, as proven by how he handed it to his staff to look at in the elevator, but if that staff hadn’t stopped to thank him, that USB data would be in the wind.
Not long ago the tech company I work at announced layoffs and for everyone to expect an email with whether they've been laid off or not. Most stressful 15 minutes of my whole career.
In my experience, anxiety is something you have. Layoffs give it a convenient focus but it doesn't have to be that way.
I used to work at a hedge fund that basically screened for mental health during hiring. When we had layoffs, nobody freaked out. We knew we had a good run, we knew severance was good and we knew we'd be highly desirable in the market. So we metabolized the layoffs and went on with our lives.
My job after that was at a scale up that leaned woke (a lot of employees were sold a tenuous connection between our work and a feel good mission). When layoffs happened, it was basically an all out mental health crisis, with everyone feeding into everyone else's anxiety. The facts weren't that different than at the hedge fund but the amount of angst and freaking out was through the roof.
Now at a FAANG, obviously had layoffs recently. The emotional vibe is somewhere between the two above. Coworkers that came from tougher places (finance, Microsoft, Amazon) are holding it together fine. Others are not.
I once heard the analogy of an orange. When you squeeze an orange, orange juice comes out because that's what an orange is made off. If extreme anxiety comes out when you are squeezed, it was there all along.
I think something you're overlooking is that people from less privileged backgrounds tend to experience a higher degree of financial insecurity.
If you don't have family that can help you and you grew up eating out of soup kitchens, you're going to have a very different attitude to the prospect of job loss (even if you're "making decent money" at one of these "woke companies") than someone who comes from money and didn't have these issues growing up.
You're less likely to take risks, and you're more likely to pursue more secure careers (tech being a good one of late).
Now that tech is not looking so safe anymore, of course there are a lot of people who are having full on crises.
Dismissing those people as "being made of anxiety" fails to acknowledge the factors that caused the situation in the first place. Sure, someone with a wealthy family isn't freaking out right now, and they're probably less anxious in general. They have good reason to not care about maybe getting laid off, just as the people who are quite worried about it have good reasons to be anxious about getting laid off
Yep, additionally some people may not have nearly as much of a financial safety net depending on their circumstances. I'm pretty privileged but early in my tech career if I had lost one of my gigs I don't know if I would have been able to find something else before I would have chewed through the limited savings we had. This was at a time when remote wasn't nearly as popular and high CoL made it much harder to save.
I'm not as lucky, and this almost exactly happened to me. I burned through all my savings just paying rent, eventually losing my apartment and leaving the industry for a few years, then moving back home in a different city. Which of course I was happy to have, but it's a cold and desolate isolated place. Went from a promising development career yo literally working part-time at Starbucks in my late twenties. To this day I have like 8 years of accumulated back taxes to resolve, which will probably end up being a refund at this point.
First, everybody is capable of anxiety and that's normal and to be expected in the current climate.
> a scale up that leaned woke [...] When layoffs happened, it was basically an all out mental health crisis, with everyone feeding into everyone else's anxiety.
Second, having an anxiety disorder is not a moral or behavioral failure and I don't see necessarily how it could be correlated to "wokeness".
> When you squeeze an orange, orange juice comes out because that's what an orange is made off. If extreme anxiety comes out when you are squeezed, it was there all along.
Again, this analogy doesn't make sense. It's totally normal for oranges to be full of orange juice. It would be weird if something else (or no thing at all) came out... Same with anxiety - it's normal for people to be stressed out in a stressful situation. It's not necessarily healthy, but should be expected.
Otoh, having an anxiety disorder is not a normal psychological state, but that's something that shows up all the time, not just when you're "squeezed".
I responded to them too, but I think their point is that some people have an internal sense of resilience, or a constructed foundation of security, that makes them less susceptible to anxiety in the face of unexpected change.
You’re right that this doesn’t mean that people who are more anxious have somehow failed morally or behaviorally, and also right that nobody is immune to anxiety altogether.
But I don’t think they were saying those things. They were just saying that some people are capable of navigating stuff like job loss with confidence and sharing their experience of environments that seemed to have proportionately more or less of those people.
I do think that on net it read as dismissive to the real personal experience of the “oranges” who are highlighted in the article, but also think you’re responding to things that weren’t said there.
Thank you for articulating what I was saying better than I did.
You are exactly right in what I am saying and there's a part of me that hopes some people are inspired by this information to build up their resilience
> their point is that some people have an internal sense of resilience, or a constructed foundation of security
This may be true, but I think that this is also something that can be learned, at least to a good degree. Personally I feel I have managed to become less anxiety-prone through conscious effort and introspective work. Being an "orange" is not an immutable fact.
Maybe not clearly expressed, but I took the parents point about mental preparedness and environment being big factors in dealing with anxiety, generally, and layoffs.
Probably because they are more likely seek and have access to mental health resources and help (hence the ability to have their problems “identified”). Then you have a high gun suicide rate among conservatives (who have easier access to guns than mental health resources).
"Don't worry -- the reasons you have for anxiety are illegitimate" is sure to calm people down. If software doesn't work out you should consider talk therapy.
> hedge fund [...] nobody freaked out. [...] we knew severance was good and we knew we'd be highly desirable in the market.
> scale up that leaned woke [...] feel good mission [...] all out mental health crisis [...]
> FAANG [...] emotional vibe is somewhere between the two [...] Coworkers that came from tougher places (finance, Microsoft, Amazon) are holding it together fine. Others are not.
Rather than attributing this to some employees being made of more-anxious stuff, could this also be explained by:
* Concern about personal financial safety net (war chest, family money, connections, job market for them at that time)?
* Concern about being able to find another work situation that they like (including perceived woke feel-good mission, and like-minded colleagues, for those people)?
What's the lesson here? I'm guessing you're not literally saying "don't hire people who suffer from anxiety issues", but it's not clear to me what anyone is supposed to do if they think you're correct.
Okay, so people who had historically high-paying jobs, who were at a high-paying company with above-average severance, didn't have anxiety around layoffs. You can't say anxiety around layoffs is purely about mental health without looking at the financial aspect of it.
> Now at a FAANG, obviously had layoffs recently. The emotional vibe is somewhere between the two above. Coworkers that came from tougher places (finance, Microsoft, Amazon) are holding it together fine. Others are not.
This rings true to me too. Another factor I'll highlight is the average age of the employees. I'm older than most of those I work with. I've been through rounds of layoffs at other companies. It's stressful, but I know how it happens and what to expect. A lot of them have worked their entire careers at successful companies during good times. They're freaking out because they haven't been through it before.
Okay, but when you hire a few hundred thousand people into a booming industry and promise them unprecedented compensation, you’ll probably end up with at least a couple oranges in there. Maybe even a lot.
Can we offer them some understanding and sympathy?
Must there be some token sympathy shown in any sort of analysis on this topic? Anyways
> promise them unprecedented compensation
They were promised and received uncompensated compensation. No promises of indefinite employment were ever given, and it’s a bit naive to assume boom times never end. I think it’s fair to make this point too, even if on an individual level I sympathize with pretty much anyone that loses their job.
I deeply appreciate your other response to me as well as this comment / question.
Obviously this is going to happen, I am not shocked or surprised and I get how it can cause anxiety to emerge.
I do think there's a connection between resilience (as you observed in your other response) and entitlement. I am not sure which way causality flows but you wrote: "promise them unprecedented compensation" - I feel like there's also a realistic mindset that should go with interpreting that: I am hired to do a job and things could change (vs something like I get this comp because the universe knows I am the shit or something like that)
200k is an arbitrary number but the general point is that someone making multiples of the median household income with high future prospects does not know the kind of struggle faced by many people and therefore does not deserve sympathy.
I've been waiting to discover whether or not I'm getting laid off (probably not, my M2 tells me). But anyways, yeah I'm at a big tech company going through rounds of layoffs.
I'm at a good point where I'm wrapping a bunch of stuff up. So I've been trying to make sure I tie up all loose ends and make sure, if the axe lands on my neck, that my colleagues can pick up everything where I left off. After round one, it wasn't the anxiety (I'm in a good spot, companies are hungry to poach from tech companies like mine; I'll land on my feet), it was the lack of will to really work too terribly hard until I knew that I'd be sticking around.
I still don't know. So I'm not working overly hard of late. I have started to see people I know get the axe though, and that has an effect on you. I'm only working hard on wrap-up activities, and turning down new big stuff.
Congrats (Big Company), you played yourself. Want to keep morale up? Don't hire a shit ton of people, and then fire a shit ton of people a few months later.
Survivor’s Guilt and a compulsive need to justify my continued existence in the role, coupled with sheer terror of losing my income, my home, and all the auxiliary benefits thereof have made me NEED to be seen by management.
My code commits are up, my bug finds are significantly higher, and I’ve taken on educational and sales initiatives to drive adoption and revenue in much bigger ways.
I was a poor Welfare kid who never had any idea about seeing the money I have in tech. Now, even though I’ve got 6 months of savings and skills that I’m sure will land me just fine, I’m pushing harder after watching a 25% layoff happen and seemingly more low-profile layoffs and reorganization.
It weird the first time you get paid a SV compensation, but live in the Midwest, making your income stretch, saving, and getting a few nice things: there’s still that inner poor kid who isn’t sure where the next meal’s coming from, or if you’d be able to pay for vehicle repairs or get your kids’ braces taken care of; all things that seemed unimaginable just five years back working IT regionally.
There’s the underlying fear that it’s all going to go away and you’ll be back to paycheck-to-paycheck after learning life doesn’t have to be that way.
That’s what keeps me motivated; I cha fed my stars, and I’m looking to make sure I keep them changed and give my kids a life I couldn’t have fathomed.
So, I push harder and work even more to make sure my place at the table is either secured, or a great portfolio to have on hand to show the next place.
I can’t tell if this is noble or pathological, but I know I’m stretched thin emotionally and am not sleeping because of it. Here it is 3AM, the soul’s midnight, and I’m thinking about a few projects I still need to do initial commits on and start some regression testing…
There's a famous statistic from 2008 in the US that said something along the lines of, for every 1% of unemployment there were 40,000 suicides. That makes unemployment almost as deadly as coronavirus. I don't believe that statistic has changed.
Right, but where there is higher-than-normal instability is among the top 25% of earners, so it's difficult to convince people of this on a forum like HN.
The actual paragraph of interest from the 2005 book is this: “According to one study [the one by Bluestone et al.], a 1 percent increase in the unemployment rate will be associated with 37,000 deaths (including 20,000 heart attacks), 920 suicides, 650 homicides, 4,000 state mental hospital admissions and 3,300 state prison admissions.”
Actually the author of that post thinks the number is higher at 47,500 based on data:
And the impact likely is now greater than estimated by Bluestone, Harrison, and Baker nearly 40 years ago. With this updated analysis, a more current estimate appears to be more in the range of 47,500 deaths for every 1% point increase in America’s average annual unemployment rate.
Both are unfortunately very deadly and there’s a lot of societal value in preventing both (without inducing more costly trade offs). Covid appears to be killing at a rate of 138,000 per year in just the United States.
I wonder how the quality of social support systems affects this statistic.
That is: perhaps unemployment isn’t the cause, but financial peril is. And maybe half-decent social systems that mitigate financial peril in the face of unemployment could have an effect.
I would say it's less likely to be financial peril (though no doubt that plays a part, especially when e.g. health insurance is required for some expensive treatment), and more likely when a person identifies too much with their job.
If you identify too much with your job, losing it is an attack on your ego and it damages your sense of who you are. It's like you died; the role you played in a whole network of social relations is gone. Your status and importance, if you mentally invested yourself in it, is diminished, possibly to irrelevance. You're a nobody.
I think this kind of mindset can push someone over the edge.
I worked for a company heavily into government contracts and got into a tight squeeze. They had two rounds of layoffs in two years. Both on a Friday. The first one was crazy, no one knew anything, and suddenly you saw people crying in the hallways. By mid-day, the news spread that the company is doing layoffs. The team I was in went to lunch, and we all toasted a glass of whiskey, expecting to lose some folks. Luckily we didn't. The following year, the same thing happened; suddenly, people getting laid off. We called it Black Friday. We went for whiskey again. No one got laid off. We were lucky to be working on a strategic project. Still, the affected people in the hallways were definitely something I'll remember.
The company is doing very bad now. What was once our manager is now scraping by, doing database administration and fixing some bugs, as he's the only one left from our former team, and there's a government obligation to keep the system running. He stayed because he has stocks in the company that have plummeted, but he's still hopeful. He sometimes asks for our help, even after a decade, and sometimes we hop on and help him with something for the sake of old times.
I was at dinner with friends last night, and among the 6 of us, 5 of our employers had done layoffs in the last few weeks, and the 6th's employer has been talking about it. Certainly anecdotal but it was extremely jarring
I don't feel particularly worried about my job, but multiple people at the table reported extreme anxiety over the layoffs, and I imagine that's more often than not the case
losing your job sucks, and anxiety sucks and is draining and deleterious. But the solution is building a society where the citizens are resilient against such strains, not a society where people are guaranteed not to lose their jobs or a society where certain jobs are coveted because they are sinecures as we see in all govt jobs everywhere but which particularly made a splash recently with the civil service exam cheating in India. All the effort that goes into clawing your way through that system would be much better spent on productive jobs.
I'm not offering a solution, but trying to point at the problem and create awareness that pure job security in exchange for nothing is a pipedream like getting in shape without working out.
Locking down a job so you can be secure discourages hiring in the first place and encourages economic sclerosis.
My smaller company had a layoff and since I just joined back late last year plus am feeling slower than usual I feel more anxious about things if we do another wave of layoffs eventually. Doesn't help matters since I'm trying my best already and having that hanging over me is not helpful.
Leadership held an all-hands meeting letting people know that layoffs were coming, and the VP of each person's respective area would walk over to their desk to inform them personally.
On the day of the layoffs, you could feel the stress in the air. Not much smiling, except the forced kind after someone tries to break the tension with a joke.
And then, a door at the end of a row of cubes opens and your VP walks into the area. Everyone wonders if they're the one (they've been wondering since they learned of the layoff, but something changes when the agent of termination literally walks through the door). She walks down your row, nearing your desk, and your heart starts pounding. She keeps walking, and you breathe a sigh of relief. You peek over the edge of your cube to see her talking to Joe, and a few minutes later he is escorted from the premises.
A few minutes later, she walks into the area again, and the cycle of stress repeats.
I survived the cut, but the experience still sits with me. I don't remember much about any specific day during my next half-decade there, but I remember that day like it was yesterday.
I know some of the recent layoffs have been handled terribly, but I never again want to be sitting in my cube, wondering if I'm next every time the door down the hallway opens.