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).
Being unexpectedly unemployed also starts a virtual timer of sorts not on your terms. Regardless of how you feel about the event, the longer it persists is universally seen as a negative signal to those that would hire you for your next role. It gets exponentially worse as time goes on making it even harder to find a job, because of the increased time you don't have a job.
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 would add, that in addition to the immediate need for income, there's an identity component of just being gainfully employed, marching along in life and providing for others. Hitting the brakes on that does psychological harm.
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.
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 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 think this "I will die" thought is one of the persistent fallacies that create stress for people who are unemployed (and keep the currently-employed quiet and compliant).
Everyone should consider, will you actually die? And - the converse - do you think you'll avoid death forever?
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.
> People get touchy when this is brought up, but young recruiter women aren't attracted to them and are biased
Age discrimination is real (I'm 56) but if you honestly think this way age discrimination isn't your biggest problem. You sound old fashioned and entitled in your thinking rather than experienced. That sort of stuff might fly on Facebook but if that's what you're presenting in your job search it's not going to fly.
I've been doing one of those "Randstad" recruiter support things after lay off, and one of the first things they hammer away is "Ageism is a thing" and have us remove our dates of graduation on our LinkedIns.
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.
those ones typically don't have the vested interest but are just as clueless and probably have a worse ageism bias. It's hard enough for technical people to assess talent; in-house recruiters at best are weak keyword matchers, at least IME.
Honestly, even assuming a bias, I doubt it's attractiveness. What's usually cited with hiring older employees is the additional social cost, as well as time off work (because they often have families to support and are more settled).
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.
> I promise -- promise! -- this is not a factor lol.
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.
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.
Any tips for others? Sounds like you got into freelance. I might have my first freelance client as well on Monday, and I am feeling like a good time is about to come though I also wonder how to find other clients.
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.
Yes. It is similar to the military saying that, "cemetry is full of indespensible people." We think the company won't thrive without us, but flow of life finds a way to do without it. This realization can be good or bad depending on your outlook.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
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?"
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.
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.
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 %
99 comments
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.
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'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.
> If I am unemployed long enough in America, I will eventually die.
Not wrong.
Everyone should consider, will you actually die? And - the converse - do you think you'll avoid death forever?
> Everyone should consider, will you actually die?
Depends on where you live. I had the luck of losing everything once. I also had the luck of living in Florida at the time.
Non-homeless, just intoxicated people have frozen to death outside where I live now.
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.
> People get touchy when this is brought up, but young recruiter women aren't attracted to them and are biased
Age discrimination is real (I'm 56) but if you honestly think this way age discrimination isn't your biggest problem. You sound old fashioned and entitled in your thinking rather than experienced. That sort of stuff might fly on Facebook but if that's what you're presenting in your job search it's not going to fly.
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.
> 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.
> I promise -- promise! -- this is not a factor lol.
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/
> Personally I think
- think? or
- believe?
or
- hope?
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.
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 are a lot of people who retire and die not long after because
Because they are old. Retirement age is close to the death, especially for men. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/life-expectancy.htm
>There are a lot of people who retire and die not long after
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
> 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.
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.
>> 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.
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'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?"
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.
> 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 %