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.

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.

Fun leaving to deal with a health issue that starts that timer before you can even get to the prepping and interviewing needed to land a job

I'm currently in that spiral. It is not pleasant knowing every month makes it harder to get back in

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.

It's not really "lucky" to have a sense of identity outside of work. The opposite is just unhealthy, even if common.

By "lucky" I mean "you have a beneficial attribute which is uncommon".

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.

It certainly can be both, no? It was for me at least

It can be both, one or the other, or neither.

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.

"Consultant" for an LLC you own is a perfectly legit job. I've opened brokerage accounts and bank accounts while in that status.

You should be able to open a brokerage account. You generally need ~2 years of business history to get a loan.

Founder & CEO at stealth startup

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.

> If I am unemployed long enough in America, I will eventually die.

Not wrong.

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!

Have you considered the possibility that the issue might be your own biases, not those of the recruiters?

I'm pretty sure any recruiter's primary motivation is to find a fit for the role so they can get their commission.

I'm talking in-house recruiters/HR, not the external broker types

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.

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.

> 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.

There is definitely a correlation but I don't believe it's the causation

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.

Sorry. I can’t really be of help. All the work I do, is unpaid; either for myself, or for nonprofits.

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.

My first job-job got hit by the dotcom crash, but was fortunately a real business with actual revenue, and the CEO was an absolute class act.

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.

Can you share which company that was for our collective curiosities? I am hoping it was long enough ago and positive enough a story to reveal.

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.

I suspect most retirees would disagree.

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.

The Day I Realized Work Was Stealing My Life https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yw6tBaT0X4

Many would disagree but many would disagree.

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.

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.

Retirees without a meaning outside of work don’t live long. They don’t need “a job”, but like every human, they need a reason to wake up in the morning. For lots of people (even retirees), that is/was a job.

"For lots of American people (even retirees)" LOL

> 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.

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.

> modern layoffs in aggregate are at least partially (~20%) intended and communicated as being ways to get rid of 'low performers',

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.

vibe layoffs are bad practice due to fundamental attribution error (line managers don't necessarily have any idea who their low performers are even if they think they do) and ultimately expose the company to discrimination lawsuits if hr doesn't enforce a fair and consistent selection criteria

So what do you recommend instead, a dice roll?

I mean - you don't want to keep the unlucky people, right?

Why not? Same for hiring. People keep trying to impress order on a process that is ultimately, inherently chaotic, because of the reliance on disorderly human agents to carry it out.

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.

>> 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.

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 follow an informal rule of "never be the first person in a conversation to bring up work/career" (or weather, or family/kids).

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.

That is horrible. Conversations are most easy to start around weather, work, and family. (Travel, where you live, hobbies, and sport are most of the rest.)

you don't help anyone avoiding conversation.

That’s why it’s a game.

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.

that makes sense.

bluGill: "how is your family" $another-guy: oh, still dead after that train crash. or bluGill : "what do you do for work" $another-girl: why are you asking? Do you have a problem with that? ... fun conversations indeed.

I don’t understand what you’re trying to communicate.

I don’t have a problem with those questions. I do have a problem with getting bored at social events by boring boilerplate conversation, and I shared my strategy for having interesting conversations.

I’m happy to debate you if you clearly state a viewpoint.

I hate asking people what they do, but it's hard to know ahead of time what questions will get an excited answer, so it's sort of a fall back.

I feel like asking 'what brought you to <city>?' is a framing that doesn't box them in so much, they can respond with non-work interests or volunteer about what they do if they want

"What you do" seems more sympathetic than "who you are" and "who you know". American culture might be more meritocratic at a basic level.

I would say it's pretty rare to hear, "What do you do?" as a first introduction in the wild in America.

"How do you know x?" is in fact much more common.

it depends on where you live in america too. in somewhere like seattle everyone has to have a what’s your job and title dick waving contest

i live in a more laid back city now and i have friends where i still have no idea what they do for work

What about it don’t you understand?

You can never get into any kind of detail with people from a different career path.

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.

I love talking to people about their work, especially if it's a field I know nothing about. People spend eight hours a day doing something, they have a lot of knowledge about it.

When it's a job that's opaque to me, I like asking "What's a typical day for you like at work?"

Only about 1-in-10 people have even heard of my company (AMD). Most that have are businesspeople/investors/tech workers. That is slowly changing but it is difficult to explain what segment of the economy I work in.

About 30% of Canada are in the public sector. There aren't enough jobs in the private sector, so we hire many people to reduce the unemployment rate.

Asking such a person "what's a typical day for you like at work?" would be "writing/approving briefing notes/decks". Generally, you'd ask what ministry they're in and go over the org chart. You can spend about 20 minutes figuring out the exact agency/ministry/division they work in relative to yours, then gossip about name changes or re-orgs.

Unfortunately, that only works if you're also a public sector worker.

Also, youth unemployment rate in Canada is about 15% right now. Even bringing up the subject of jobs makes people in my age group uncomfortable since you're forcing them to admit they're unemployed. It's too risky a question.

What? I get so much joy out of learning the details of careers of people in different industries than me. I had an hourlong conversation with someone the other day who is in the high-end rug business…where he sources from, how he deals with difficult clientele, how he gets new leads, what it’s like visiting the remote villages where the rugs are made, etc. And another one with a hedge fund quant, and a separate one with a professional dancer. These are some of my favorite conversations to have with people.

I'm from America and I also dislike it because it's usually a rude question often used by small-minded people to pigeonhole others into presumptive stereotypes or by people who don't put much thought into substantive or genuine conversation. It's also sometimes a passive-aggressive question really asking "How much do you make?" by cheap materialists.

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.]

How can you possibly not understand? You really are flummoxed about people who devote themselves to supporting their families economically and thus invest great energy into that pursuit?

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?

How are those the same? You're comparing exclusively star athletes and the general public - many of whom might have jobs in fields not of their choosing, be underpaid, doing grunt work, etc. It's rare to have a high paying, interesting job with good working environment. As another commenter mentioned, it can devolve into status games as well, which is off-putting.

On the Internet, where passive aggressive behaviors reign supreme, "I don't understand" is code for "I dislike"

The people that say it about mundane things like asking what someone does for a living, know full well why people ask it.

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.

A lot of times you realize that talking shop made much of your connection, or continuing the in-jokes from work. When you're out of the loop, it's no longer the same.

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.

> 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?"

> Certain regions of the world or U.S. seem to care a lot more about peer-perception than others.

This wasn't true even for US few decades ago.

Jerry Seinfeld - MONEY became EVERYTHING

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7BgwUL_X75Y

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

They're different questions but I wouldn't put the onus on the respondent because it's ambiguous, perhaps tactically so, since it's gauche to ask the latter, at least as stated. That way you can still prime the question but have plausible deniability.

> 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 %

> This is a fabulation, right. What kind of POS parent would instill self-worth on money and career into their kids?

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.

What a world it would be if people were more open to introspecting, figuring out their motivations, and changing their behavior accordingly. So many people living in reaction to societal influences, not really asking if advice is true or even aligns with their ends.

People do not absorb culture only from their parents.

The entire school system, even going through to University league tables (graduate employment/earnings), is geared around this. Everything is increasingly difficult for young people, and there's very little we can do to improve things for them.