Market still seems hot for senior/staff devs. Getting laid off is a free lunch + a paid vacation to interview for a better job. Thank god I listened to my mom and learned to code.
It's a little stressful but a reminder that real wealth is the freedom to not be employed for a little while.
Keep six months expenses on hand to deal with this kind of thing and you won't have to be afraid of being laid off. Like you say, if you're prepared it's a free vacation and and opportunity to be picky with your next job.
I'm thankful that the school that I attended forced us to take electives outside of Computer Science and Engineering. I took some Psychology classes. The list of stressful events was very surprising to me. The author alludes to it in the post. I recall that typically "happy" events are stressful, too.
Here's the list [0]:
Death of a spouse (or child*): 100
Divorce: 73
Marital separation: 65
Imprisonment: 63
Death of a close family member: 63
Personal injury or illness: 53
Marriage: 50
Dismissal from work: 47
Marital reconciliation: 45
Retirement: 45
I recently went through a layoff, like probably quite a few in our industry lately, so it rings very true to me.
What’s my score according to my timeline of events -
Late 2016- Layoff
Early 2017- moved across country for new job
Mid 2018- Got married
Mid 2018- Layoff from second company
Mid 2018-Mid 2019 - Moved away and back for two jobs
Oct 2019 - Started new job
Nov 2019 - Birth of child
Dec 2019 - Death of father
Mar 2020 - Cannot visit mother for 2 years due to Covid
I think my score is about 210-290 for the last 4-5 years . And I am supposed to keep a high performance because of health insurance and keeping my visa lol.
One can address the stress of layoffs by switching over to becoming a consultant, slowly ramping up premiums, treating each job as something that can end the next day, and scheduling the life with that in mind (i.e. not putting all your eggs into a single basket, talking to other "job-providers" all the time etc.).
I would love to become a consultant. Any suggestions on how to do it? I feel like consulting a skill set different from being a developer. I think some folks fall into it, but I certainly haven't been able to.
> I feel like consulting a skill set different from being a developer.
Not really, "consultant" is just another word for contractor. Almost 20 years ago the company I worked for did a round of layoffs that did not affect me. But it got me thinking and I started looking around and decided to try contracting. It was just like being employed except the term was set (6 months) and the money was much better than being employed. That 6 month contract turned into 18 months and I did contracting for many years after. I don't regret it. It was the best money I ever made. But when you're doing hourly contracting it's hard to stop thinking about billable hours outside of work (especially if there's lots of work and no overtime cap.) "If I take a vacation I'm not billing for $X and I have to pay for the vacation, etc." Everything has its trade-offs. I'm employed now, but some days I think about getting back to contracting.
> Not really, "consultant" is just another word for contractor.
The difference between consultant and contractor in my neck of the woods, is that consultants have multiple clients where as a contractor is basically an employee-employer relationship, simply structured in a different way.
I believe the grandparent was specifically referring to an arrangement where you have more than one customer ("employer", if you will) to mitigate the risk of getting laid off.
Surely, this must be culture and country dependent. Given the safety net in the country where I live in, being fired is far from being as important as marriage.
Getting laid off is a traumatic event. It is not a hero's journey except in so far as a hero's journey is exciting because it talks about a path through dangerous times where a person can fail.
I, and likely many of us, have a family. We are blessed to work in technology where we earn more than we make and can put up savings for rainy days.
The average person with a family who gets laid off will not sense adventure - they will have despair. Utter despair and worthlessness and the hope they can get things back together before their family suffers.
Heck even us tech workers can feel that way. The most depressed time of my entire life was after I had been laid off. It was bad enough that I was having negative thoughts almost every day nonstop. It was traumatic enough that it fundamentally changed my approach to savings, life, and risk (likely for the worst).
I am better now, have a family, a career I enjoy, but I now know how easy it is for the veneer to be ripped away. Its not a hero's journey - its a nightmare.
Some people may think of it as a vacation. I don't think most people in the world would and not even most people in technology.
In my own experience, it was a sense of worthlessness that seeped into me daily. I was newly married, my wife supportive, but it was constantly between us. "How did it go today, did you find anything interesting? No - ok, no worries, I'm sure something will pop up."
Deep depression and a sense that you are failing your family, that if you had tried harder maybe it wouldn't have happened, that you arn't successful and that is why noone would want to have you.
Funny. I had thought I was over it - its been a long long long time - but I find myself affected even writing this.
Contrast it with my experience where my wife was 100% supportive of me taking multiple months of not working at all and not really looking to recover from my time at my previous employer.
I think you're presupposing that your experience is universal. I felt refreshed and reinvigorated when I started my new job, not panicked and depressed, because I had created for myself a solid support structure for such eventualities (financially and socially).
I would argue that the real key here is preparation; if you can set yourself up not to be harmed by something like a lay off, you will be much more likely to go through it in a positive way than if you leave it up to fate to decide how and when you experience such a potentially negative event.
Calling it a "predictable eventuality" implies the victim is at fault for not preparing. I have a number of friends (of course, not software devs) who are aware that their company may at any point dump them (one company goes even so far as to say regularly "everyone is replaceable," and I have not been able to talk said friend out of leaving...). Due to a variety of reasons / excuses, they can't or won't leave these companies, and are not financially well off, so when it does come, they're going to be SOL. It's not un-preparedness, it's inability to get ahead of it. Yes, some of them could be making better fiscal decisions, but others are trapped by kids, medical conditions.. etc.
People treat being laid off like they treat death - it's something they intellectually know can happen, and does happen to others, but they're always entirely surprised when it happens to them.
Many people (myself included!) have a hard time saving against potential outcomes and find it convenient to explain away why I don't (as I spend money on non-necessities).
Definitely, and I don't mean it to sound like these people couldn't be making better choices, but once you've dug your hole deep enough, it's hard to ever get to a point where you can be "safe" from this sort of thing. Even if they knew, for example, that the company was shutting down for a month starting in six months, the likelihood of being able to stow away ~ two paychecks during that window is quite small.
I've been laid off six times. It was a surprise once, the first time, an early job at Wal-mart. The other five times I could see it coming (and three of those times I had already started actively interviewing elsewhere). Three of those jobs were small businesses in the video game industry, where layoffs after a game is finished and released are pretty common.
I was actually more surprised that I somehow didn't get laid off at a previous corporation that had multiple rounds of deep layoffs, especially considering how often I had been laid off in the past.
In fact I found out when the department head put in his notice that I was on the list of one of those layoffs, but so many people quit in the meantime that they didn't need to lay off as many people, so he was able to take me off the list. I stayed there a little too long, through inertia and also I had so many 1 to 1.5 year job "hops" from all those previous layoffs I felt I should stick around a bit longer to show I am able to stick with a company when they let me.
It would have been a blessing if they had laid me off, though, it would have forced me to find a much better job much earlier.
This strikes at the heart of the matter - you want the 6 mo or 1 yr "nest egg" so you don't have to wait for the company to tell you it's time to move on - you can jump ship earlier once you start noticing the signs.
I really am blaming the "victim" of a layoff of an upper class engineering job if they suffer the consequences of setting up their lives as though they will always be employed without gaps.
It is not a lot to ask for someone in the top x% of earners to set aside a few months' expenses instead of spending every dollar on housing/food/entertainment/etc.
There are situations where employers do mistreat employees, but failing to guarantee perpetual employment is not one of them.
It depends. I got laid off during the dot bomb (contract not renewed) and I had 4 months of money saved up. I was out of work for 6 and had to move to a new city. The dot bomb + 9/11 was pretty devastating for the area I had worked in. I had only been in the biz for a few years and didn't make that much as a tech person. It was also a techie college town, so there was lots of labor supply.
I got laid off again about 3 years ago. It was nice. I got an immediate offer from someone I had worked with before. I wished I could have taken more time off. I currently have several years of expenses available to me.
It really depends on where you are in your career. Money really is freedom in the US, try not to spend it carelessly.
The majority of folks are forced to live paycheck to paycheck, not of their own volition. I'd be fine for quite some time, heck I could probably semi retire so to speak.
The majority of which folks? People in the world? Certainly. People in history? Even more certainly. People in the United States of America? ...I mean, probably not actually a majority, but certainly lots of people in the US would have difficulty putting away months' worth of savings without really rigorous amounts of financial discipline.
The majority of people who read Hacker News? Uh. No.
Median household income in the US is about $67k, and of course median cost of living the US is much lower than in the SF Bay area. It is thoroughly possible to put away enough money to pay for car troubles or many kinds of medical problems without superhuman financial discipline for most households in the US.
Now:
1. Is there a substantial minority who genuinely can only really live hand-to-mouth in the US? Yes.
2. Is it obviously much easier for those of us who have tech-job incomes to put away substantial savings than it is for the median family? Also yes.
3. Am I personally some kind of paragon of financial discipline? No.
4. Is it understandable why many people live closer to paycheck-to-paycheck than they could? Yes.
But I don't think that hyperbole serves anyone here.
I think actual numbers are hard to come by, but I would say it's like a "go do it then" sort of thing. It's easy for well off folks to offer thoughts / advice.
Go accept a $67k job (which is actually higher than each of my non tech friends, but whatever), and then go live somewhere on that (renting too!). After a few years, show me how much you've saved. I have zero doubt you'll find it's been eaten up by emergencies, etc. Then get laid off! Hopefully you don't have family to take care of either. I don't even want to think about what happens to your health in that time (fitness, nutrition, etc.).
That's why I have major respect for folks who do it. I don't think I'd have the resolve.
That's also why I fight for better pay / social safety net for all. They shouldn't have to live like that.
I think actual numbers aren't at all hard to come by, this is extremely well-studied and easily available to anyone by Googling. But I see that now we're going to go, "Well, the anecdotes of my friends trump actual data."
As I said, go do it! Most studies I've seen state that it's hard to know because paycheck to paycheck is such a loaded word. And it's easy to access that the majority of Americans end up in medical debt in their lifetime.
Sure, yes, I'll upend my life for multiple years in order to satisfy the demands of a random HN poster. That seems highly reasonable. Quick question: how many times have you completely changed your entire life because someone on the internet told you that you weren't allowed to have a comment before you did that?
If you're going to say something like "It is thoroughly possible to put away enough money to pay for car troubles or many kinds of medical problems without superhuman financial discipline for most households in the US." then you should be willing to put your money where your mouth is or prove it in some fashion (run a fake budget based on your household making that amount).
I have a low tolerance for making light of other's situations.
Why not admit it takes a good amount of financial discipline (if not superhuman)?
I did say that. You got pissy because I didn't agree with your over the top hyperbole, then you said a lot of ridiculous nonsense, and now that you're ridiculous nonsense has been called you're trying to retroactively pull back on your claims.
Financial discipline is hard, it's totally understandable why people don't save as much as would be optimal. I also don't save as much as is optimal. It requires good financial discipline to save money when your budget is limited.
But it doesn't require living like a monk or spending every minute of every day pinching pennies to put away $1000 to $3000 or so per year for most Americans, and if you do that you'll be insulated against the kind of minor disasters that happen once a decade or so.
Actually - over half the country is living pay-check to paycheck. We are lucky to do what we do, don't forget that.
I worked a ton of awful jobs before breaking into the industry. A lot of people don't know what it's like to be stepped on in STEM fields but its a constant thing for lower echelons of our society. Cold World
People have very different paychecks, very different family sizes and essential needs (such as necessary medication etc.). And yet, majority of people have to spend exactly their entire paycheck? I don't buy that. Sounds more like, for a lot of people, the lifestyle is inflated to as much as the paycheck allows.
It very much depends on a lot of things including the economic conditions at the time.
I was laid off almost immediately after 9/11 in the midst of dot-bomb. As it turned out, I almost immediately landed a new job with someone I knew. It was a pay cut and that company barely made it through the dot-bomb aftermath itself. But it was a comparatively good landing considering. I wasn't about to starve but you didn't want to be cashing in stock at the time. And I definitely knew, especially older, people who lost their jobs in that period and never really recovered in terms of financial position or career.
Under those circumstances, unless you have a lot of cash tucked away, you probably shouldn't be treating it as a vacation. I wouldn't say it was traumatic for me--I pretty much knew it was coming and I lucked out--but it could have been quite bad as I didn't have so much as a nibble from anyone else I talked to.
Having an emergency fund is basic financial planning that is too often neglected.
Even with a cushion to fall back on though, don’t discount how it’s going to feel seeing the balance fall month after month.
I expected a break when a company I worked for closed down. In fact, it was autumn and my original plan was to enjoy some time off and pick things up in the new year. Part of me regrets not doing that but I know at the time stress quickly set in.
The hero's journey is about facing a nightmare and emerging successful. So that sense, it is a hero's journey. Not everyone succeeds, but if you emerge, you are better for it.
Being so dependent on your employer that it would ruin your life if they terminated your contract is probably not a good thing. A hero's journey is about remediating that deficiency. For some people, being laid off may have been a good thing.
I never found the capitalist answer to this problem to be realistic - if you can’t find a new job then relocate. The advice is sound from an economic point of view but it’s unrealistic from a human perspective for most people. There are small numbers of people who naturally thrive moving location to location but most of us have family or just feel a sense of belonging to a particular place or don’t want to go through the hassle of being treated as an immigrant somewhere else - another aspect that humans have historically been bad at is adapting to people arriving from elsewhere.
Not to mention the overwhelming feeling of failure when you have to tell your kids they are moving away from their friends and everything they know because you lost your job.
Not only that, but moving is not free! You need money to move, often a good chunk of it. Throw in family (not a single person), and you've got a nightmare of coordination.
I agree that it is for many, but in my case it wasn't.
> It is not a hero's journey except in so far as a hero's journey is exciting because it talks about a path through dangerous times where a person can fail.
Difficult events are often found at the beginning on the hero's journey... like getting laid off.
> The average person with a family who gets laid off will not sense adventure - they will have despair. Utter despair and worthlessness and the hope they can get things back together before their family suffers.
I totally agree with this. I originally wrote more about this but I reduced it to: "Most, unfortunately, will never hear it over their newborn’s cries or the deafening financial storms that suffocate them." This will be terrible for many people, and I have endless sympathy for them. But there will be others who gain from this.
I got laid off from a company after nearly 20 years of work there. I was very lucky to get a big company layoff type package of ~ 9 months of pay. I decided to take it as opportunity to do new things.
It was still a worrying experience, had kids, family to take care of, but I chose to take that money and time and enroll in a coding boot camp and go in a new direction in life after age 40. I figured I wasn't going to see a lump sum of 9 months pay and time to do something with it ever again so I was going to take advantage of it.
Years later now I'm very happy with the decision. Starting over was stressful, but I'm much happier with what I do now... and I don't think I would have done it if I hadn't been laid off.
It was still traumatic, but I don't think I would be on this side of things had it been easier...
The teleco I used to work for gave people 2 weeks pay for every year a person was with the company when they had post merger layoffs. I don’t know if there’s a standard but that seems to line up pretty close.
9 months after 20 years doesn't seem particularly great. Heck, I got 6 months severance + 6 months of paid health insurance after being at a large corp for only 2.5 years - it was a buyout, ie. they were asking for volunteers to take severance to leave so they wouldn't need to do an actual involuntary layoff later. Seemed like a great deal and I had another gig 6 months later so it was kind of an extended vacay.
That's what the law says as a minimum but in practice it's more like a month. That's because whenever it goes to court you'll get awarded a month on average. At least I'm pretty sure that's what it's like in BC.
Similar story here. I was laid off after 4 years with a company, got 3 months severance. I used it to try freelancing while looking for full time jobs - it ended out working out really well and I am more fulfilled and make much more money now. I wouldn't have taken the leap without the layoff.
> Why are the smartest people in the world working on delivery food?
They probably aren't. Some of them are really smart. Some of them are pretty dumb. Some are determined and hardworking. Some are lazy. Most are more or less somewhere in the middle.
I don't know why anyone would assume the smartest people in the world are working on delivery food (I understand the subtext of the-smartest-people-are-choosing-to-work-on-apps-ad-tech-etc but I just don't buy it)?
A lot of startups are incredibly marginal, and a lot of the smartest, most determined people start those companies. There are so many brilliant people building payroll software and HR data normalization companies. Yes, they have lucrative markets, but are they really what our best and brightest should be working on? And with regards to staffing, these companies do recruit smart CS kids from MIT, Stanford, etc. so there is a misallocation of talent that exists.
You're doing the same thing as the article writer. Just assuming that these people are "our best and brightest." What is there to tell us that other than they're getting paid a lot of money and they went to a prestigious school? It's a nice story to tell but that's all it is IMO.
everyone in this industry loves to think that they're surrounded by (and accordingly one of) the smartest people in the world. Sure, some people in tech are very very smart, but many, maybe most, of the smartest people in the world, don't work in tech at all (they work as researchers, in universities)
Thanks for pointing this out. It's entirely possible, even likely, that the smartest people in the world don't work in tech, or finance, or any of the topics us HN readers find dearest.
Getting laid off was the "cold water shock" I needed to rewrite what had been drilled into me since grade school: if you work hard and do your job, you'll always have one and your hard work will eventually result in promotions.
I took that experience and changed what kind of jobs I looked for, and found one I'm much happier with.
Also, much work is either useless or actively bad - making any change can break something. Only doing the highest priority changes is the right way to do some jobs.
You can tactfully tell your manager that in a 1:1. I've had co-workers do that - the volunteering employee gets severance and the manager doesn't have to stress about a name for the list.
Success depends on your relationship with your manager and if they actually have control over who gets let go.
Volunteer when you hear layoffs are coming. Just tell your boss you'd like to be on the list.
They will usually oblige you because you are solving a problem for them (meeting their cut headcount requirements) and they know that if you stay you might leave anyway and if you don't you'll be unhappy.
Heck, if they layoff is a surprise, ask your boss if you can swap with someone else. They often have the flexibility to do that.
You don't have to abide by everything the guy says, but I like a lot of the ideas over at https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/ in terms of living frugally.
The ultimate form of freedom is being able to decide what you want to do with your time. One way of accomplishing that is making a ridiculous amount of money via a successful exit. Another way is to structure your life so that you're ok with less. Sure, I think most would prefer the 'have lots of money' option, but 1) even there it's easy to get sucked into spending more, as this article mentions, and 2) we have a lot more control over living frugally while earning well (most software engineers earn pretty good money) than we do over a wildly successful exit from a startup.
Never do anything your love for money. If you are intrinsically motivated to do something bringing external factors like money into it might ruin you motivation and love for the thing you had. High chance of burn out.
Find work that has great synergy with your hobbies/interest but is not exactly the same. Either requiring similar skill or being the the same or related field. That way they will fuel each other.
And most importantly, don't try to find meaning in your work (except maybe if you work in non-market driven employments like education/health care but sill beware). That is something a simple farmer that directly interacts with his produce might have experienced but modern capitalism it way too alienating for that to work. Most of the time you wont be even able to tell if you individual output makes any difference and if so for better for worse.
I think people should strive to find meaning in work, even if it's difficult. If they can't, then at least they gave it a shot. And of course, you should find meaning outside of work as well.
I was laid off my last job. It was totally expected (I saw it coming, years ahead), and the "forcing function" for me, was encountering the Brick Wall of Silicon Valley Ageism.
It forced me to accept that I was in early retirement; whether or not I liked it.
Turns out, it was the best thing that could have happened to me.
META: He may want to reconsider his choice of thumbnails. I think it's a great one, but Disney has a rather fearsome reputation for going after even the smallest misuses of its IP.
Over the coming months, tens (if not hundreds) of thousands will be laid off. This event will be the call to adventure for those that were disillusioned but hadn’t considered changing their professions.
(Or even just changing their job/company within the same profession.)
The layoffs in tech have started. It won't be as bad as the 2001-2004 dot com debacle. Possibly not as bad as the 2008-2012 period was (which wasn't as bad for tech vs the previous downturn, but was just bad overall). If you've prepared then this will be the pause that refreshes. The break you've been needing for a few years now. A time to regroup, learn new things, rethink your priorities. Recessions need not be fearsome things if you've got a good emergency fund and you can live frugally for a while. I used the '01-'04 downturn to go back to school and get a Masters degree. I view that time positively.
I suspect it will be much, much worse, for USAians anyway. So many companies have now moved almost fully remote and are looking at their payroll thinking - "Why am I paying an American dev $100,000+ when I can pay a European $50,000, or someone from the developing world $25,000?" Great for devs in the rest of the world of course.
You're going to be shocked at prices these days. Paying some poor soul from some poverty stricken developing country, and expect them to be grateful for just a job, is an archaic notion. In Latin America, the price is near US levels thanks to companies like Amazon heavily investing there these past 5 years or so. Salary at intermediate and above prices are nearly on par with US skill levels, but you do save on employment taxes so there's that.
Uh huh... This is just wrong. So the median Brazilian dev salary is 58000 BRL or about $22000 USD [1]
The median US dev salary is $73900 using the same search criteria on the same site.
In the UK it is $37000. I'm in the UK and this passes the sniff test as a median base salary.
Obviously it's more if you're in certain industries or work for certain companies (faangs).
US software developers are massively overpayed compared to devs internationally. Devs in the Bay Area are massively overpayed compared to devs in the rest of the USA. You all just haven't realised this yet.
You're leveraging historically bad pound/dollar conversion rates to get that figure. In general, US salaries are higher because of the lack of social services. $37k for a UK dev, I don't buy. I worked with Belgian devs, intermediate to senior, ten years ago and they were at $60k/year.
Regardless, that site has some very problematic data. Maybe Brazil does have a lower cost compared to other South American countries, but that site is also claiming Argentinian devs making 3700 USD per year, which is ludicrous. We can't attract even junior ones for any less than 5k per month.
And you're not showing any data at all. Please show some that shows devs in the USA aren't over compensated relative to the rest of the world. Until you do I will assume you are just using anecdata because you want to pretend that what? US devs don't get paid more than devs in the rest of the world? Why?
Yes, this is the point. If you work for an American company you will probably get paid above local market rates. But you will still likely be paid below US rates for the same company, especially if you're in a developing / emerging / whatever the current proper term that won't get me told off by people richer and better educated than me is.
If you're working for a local company the increased willingness of American companies to hire remote workers is going to raise local dev salaries due to increased competition.
I think this is a good thing. If this also comes at the expense of American devs having their salaries squeezed, frankly I don't care. You're rich. You will be slightly less rich, or even just getting richer at a slightly slower rate.
While some American devs might view this as a personal tragedy, if you subscribe to a maximin view of what a desirable global economic pathway looks like (which I do), then the squeeze on American devs and increased willingness to hire remote workers globally is a good thing.
Honestly I've been fired 6 times. And I'm thankful for each one for the same reason as the author. Grateful even.
Life is huge - humongous even and you owe it to yourself to explore.
The world is a very large place. You can succeed in very different ways as long as your provide value. In a lot of situations and places that bar of value is lower than what you are accustomed to.
I've known Billionaire founders who know little about business or code, software engineers who made more money selling shoes online.
W.r.t decisions:
People seem to need these "Walls" that they need to run into to be forced to make a decision about their lives - layoffs, firings, family care issues, health issues etc.
Don't fight it- go with the flow. Use those to do what you really want to do or at least to give it a brief try.
A low cost of living is the only thing that really gives you a robust form of freedom.
A former employer very kindly laid me off one May (after April financial results had revealed various cock-ups, and sales hadn't been as predicted etc). This was in the UK, and I got the legal minimum payout, having been there a few years. That was tax free of course, and enough to buy a few things like new big Ikea wardrobe, couple new double-glazed windows, extra week on a static caravan holiday. Deliberately didn't apply for jobs straightaway, to avoid people trying to get me to start too soon ;) Eventually got the first job I applied for that I really wanted, with a few other interview offers. Managed to swing it so it didn't start until September. So had the whole summer off, which was particularly good as our daughter, who's very young for her year, was about to start full-time school that September. So lots of nice time with her before that. Sorted out a huge mess of cr*p in the garage, and various other jobs neglected due to having small children and full time work. To this day I think that employer feels a bit bad about this, but I feel grateful. ;) Having met up with ex colleagues, its a common story, a few of us got kicked out over the years, and generally ended up having a whale of a time, learning new skills, and getting a pay-rise out of it too. ;). When else do you get paid not to go to work? ;). Hasten to add, I'm actually a hard worker, and take pride in my work. But not gonna turn down opportunity of a nice long holiday and extra cash. Had this happened in a bad job market, would have been a different story of course. Same thing happened to a friend in his 50s. He initially feared his age would be a problem. But his problem turned out to be, having to reply to so many calls from recruiters.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadKeep six months expenses on hand to deal with this kind of thing and you won't have to be afraid of being laid off. Like you say, if you're prepared it's a free vacation and and opportunity to be picky with your next job.
Still I'm fortunate/could be worse.
Here's the list [0]:
Death of a spouse (or child*): 100
Divorce: 73
Marital separation: 65
Imprisonment: 63
Death of a close family member: 63
Personal injury or illness: 53
Marriage: 50
Dismissal from work: 47
Marital reconciliation: 45
Retirement: 45
I recently went through a layoff, like probably quite a few in our industry lately, so it rings very true to me.
[0]: https://paindoctor.com/top-10-stressful-life-events-holmes-r...
So, it's a scale on a predictor of health impacts, vs say a measure of intensity.
I think my score is about 210-290 for the last 4-5 years . And I am supposed to keep a high performance because of health insurance and keeping my visa lol.
Not really, "consultant" is just another word for contractor. Almost 20 years ago the company I worked for did a round of layoffs that did not affect me. But it got me thinking and I started looking around and decided to try contracting. It was just like being employed except the term was set (6 months) and the money was much better than being employed. That 6 month contract turned into 18 months and I did contracting for many years after. I don't regret it. It was the best money I ever made. But when you're doing hourly contracting it's hard to stop thinking about billable hours outside of work (especially if there's lots of work and no overtime cap.) "If I take a vacation I'm not billing for $X and I have to pay for the vacation, etc." Everything has its trade-offs. I'm employed now, but some days I think about getting back to contracting.
The difference between consultant and contractor in my neck of the woods, is that consultants have multiple clients where as a contractor is basically an employee-employer relationship, simply structured in a different way.
I believe the grandparent was specifically referring to an arrangement where you have more than one customer ("employer", if you will) to mitigate the risk of getting laid off.
Changing jobs, changing homes, changing relationships
Try not to do all 3 at once :)
But, I think you framed it better - a lot of people interpret what my dad said as the negative, but it really is the status "change" that matters.
Getting laid off is a traumatic event. It is not a hero's journey except in so far as a hero's journey is exciting because it talks about a path through dangerous times where a person can fail.
I, and likely many of us, have a family. We are blessed to work in technology where we earn more than we make and can put up savings for rainy days.
The average person with a family who gets laid off will not sense adventure - they will have despair. Utter despair and worthlessness and the hope they can get things back together before their family suffers.
Heck even us tech workers can feel that way. The most depressed time of my entire life was after I had been laid off. It was bad enough that I was having negative thoughts almost every day nonstop. It was traumatic enough that it fundamentally changed my approach to savings, life, and risk (likely for the worst).
I am better now, have a family, a career I enjoy, but I now know how easy it is for the veneer to be ripped away. Its not a hero's journey - its a nightmare.
If you're living paycheck to paycheck it's a nightmare, if you've got months saved up set aside for exactly this kind of thing it's a vacation.
In my own experience, it was a sense of worthlessness that seeped into me daily. I was newly married, my wife supportive, but it was constantly between us. "How did it go today, did you find anything interesting? No - ok, no worries, I'm sure something will pop up."
Deep depression and a sense that you are failing your family, that if you had tried harder maybe it wouldn't have happened, that you arn't successful and that is why noone would want to have you.
Funny. I had thought I was over it - its been a long long long time - but I find myself affected even writing this.
I think you're presupposing that your experience is universal. I felt refreshed and reinvigorated when I started my new job, not panicked and depressed, because I had created for myself a solid support structure for such eventualities (financially and socially).
I would argue that the real key here is preparation; if you can set yourself up not to be harmed by something like a lay off, you will be much more likely to go through it in a positive way than if you leave it up to fate to decide how and when you experience such a potentially negative event.
Many people (myself included!) have a hard time saving against potential outcomes and find it convenient to explain away why I don't (as I spend money on non-necessities).
Not always. When I was laid off I wasn't surprised in the slightest. There had already been layoffs and the company eventually effectively shut down.
I was actually more surprised that I somehow didn't get laid off at a previous corporation that had multiple rounds of deep layoffs, especially considering how often I had been laid off in the past.
In fact I found out when the department head put in his notice that I was on the list of one of those layoffs, but so many people quit in the meantime that they didn't need to lay off as many people, so he was able to take me off the list. I stayed there a little too long, through inertia and also I had so many 1 to 1.5 year job "hops" from all those previous layoffs I felt I should stick around a bit longer to show I am able to stick with a company when they let me.
It would have been a blessing if they had laid me off, though, it would have forced me to find a much better job much earlier.
Few do, however.
It is not a lot to ask for someone in the top x% of earners to set aside a few months' expenses instead of spending every dollar on housing/food/entertainment/etc.
There are situations where employers do mistreat employees, but failing to guarantee perpetual employment is not one of them.
I got laid off again about 3 years ago. It was nice. I got an immediate offer from someone I had worked with before. I wished I could have taken more time off. I currently have several years of expenses available to me.
It really depends on where you are in your career. Money really is freedom in the US, try not to spend it carelessly.
The majority of people who read Hacker News? Uh. No.
Car trouble? Savings gone. Any sort of medical issue? Savings gone.
I actually think those folks are more financially disciplined than us, given they somehow make it work despite their low pay.
Now:
1. Is there a substantial minority who genuinely can only really live hand-to-mouth in the US? Yes.
2. Is it obviously much easier for those of us who have tech-job incomes to put away substantial savings than it is for the median family? Also yes.
3. Am I personally some kind of paragon of financial discipline? No.
4. Is it understandable why many people live closer to paycheck-to-paycheck than they could? Yes.
But I don't think that hyperbole serves anyone here.
Go accept a $67k job (which is actually higher than each of my non tech friends, but whatever), and then go live somewhere on that (renting too!). After a few years, show me how much you've saved. I have zero doubt you'll find it's been eaten up by emergencies, etc. Then get laid off! Hopefully you don't have family to take care of either. I don't even want to think about what happens to your health in that time (fitness, nutrition, etc.).
That's why I have major respect for folks who do it. I don't think I'd have the resolve.
That's also why I fight for better pay / social safety net for all. They shouldn't have to live like that.
I have a low tolerance for making light of other's situations.
Why not admit it takes a good amount of financial discipline (if not superhuman)?
What does it cost your ego to admit that?
Financial discipline is hard, it's totally understandable why people don't save as much as would be optimal. I also don't save as much as is optimal. It requires good financial discipline to save money when your budget is limited.
But it doesn't require living like a monk or spending every minute of every day pinching pennies to put away $1000 to $3000 or so per year for most Americans, and if you do that you'll be insulated against the kind of minor disasters that happen once a decade or so.
I worked a ton of awful jobs before breaking into the industry. A lot of people don't know what it's like to be stepped on in STEM fields but its a constant thing for lower echelons of our society. Cold World
The majority of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck choose to live paycheck to paycheck and act like every expense is an obligation.
I, to be fair, have been one of them for significant amounts of time, but I chose it and the consequences which were of my own making.
I was laid off almost immediately after 9/11 in the midst of dot-bomb. As it turned out, I almost immediately landed a new job with someone I knew. It was a pay cut and that company barely made it through the dot-bomb aftermath itself. But it was a comparatively good landing considering. I wasn't about to starve but you didn't want to be cashing in stock at the time. And I definitely knew, especially older, people who lost their jobs in that period and never really recovered in terms of financial position or career.
Under those circumstances, unless you have a lot of cash tucked away, you probably shouldn't be treating it as a vacation. I wouldn't say it was traumatic for me--I pretty much knew it was coming and I lucked out--but it could have been quite bad as I didn't have so much as a nibble from anyone else I talked to.
Even with a cushion to fall back on though, don’t discount how it’s going to feel seeing the balance fall month after month.
I expected a break when a company I worked for closed down. In fact, it was autumn and my original plan was to enjoy some time off and pick things up in the new year. Part of me regrets not doing that but I know at the time stress quickly set in.
Being so dependent on your employer that it would ruin your life if they terminated your contract is probably not a good thing. A hero's journey is about remediating that deficiency. For some people, being laid off may have been a good thing.
I agree that it is for many, but in my case it wasn't.
> It is not a hero's journey except in so far as a hero's journey is exciting because it talks about a path through dangerous times where a person can fail.
Difficult events are often found at the beginning on the hero's journey... like getting laid off.
> The average person with a family who gets laid off will not sense adventure - they will have despair. Utter despair and worthlessness and the hope they can get things back together before their family suffers.
I totally agree with this. I originally wrote more about this but I reduced it to: "Most, unfortunately, will never hear it over their newborn’s cries or the deafening financial storms that suffocate them." This will be terrible for many people, and I have endless sympathy for them. But there will be others who gain from this.
It was still a worrying experience, had kids, family to take care of, but I chose to take that money and time and enroll in a coding boot camp and go in a new direction in life after age 40. I figured I wasn't going to see a lump sum of 9 months pay and time to do something with it ever again so I was going to take advantage of it.
Years later now I'm very happy with the decision. Starting over was stressful, but I'm much happier with what I do now... and I don't think I would have done it if I hadn't been laid off.
It was still traumatic, but I don't think I would be on this side of things had it been easier...
It all depends on the corporation.
In my country it's currently one month of pay per year worked for layoffs where the employee was not at fault.
It's normally closer to 1-2 weeks per year. Also in the UK, ireland and france they put a very low cap on the weekly pay.
The downsides of living here are discussed elsewhere, of course. But let's not get sidetracked :)
if the employer wishes to give you more they are perfectly free to (and it's very, very common to)
They probably aren't. Some of them are really smart. Some of them are pretty dumb. Some are determined and hardworking. Some are lazy. Most are more or less somewhere in the middle.
I don't know why anyone would assume the smartest people in the world are working on delivery food (I understand the subtext of the-smartest-people-are-choosing-to-work-on-apps-ad-tech-etc but I just don't buy it)?
This is not always true. And smarts/talent aren't completely interchangeable, either.
This just tickles me. Great analogy.
I took that experience and changed what kind of jobs I looked for, and found one I'm much happier with.
Can you please clarify? What were you looking for before and after?
Stop picking up extra work just because you can do it.
Start working less hard (spend a few hours a day on hacker news, for example).
Sadly, the above often results in more promotions and being considered more important, for some reason. I can't explain it.
Success depends on your relationship with your manager and if they actually have control over who gets let go.
They will usually oblige you because you are solving a problem for them (meeting their cut headcount requirements) and they know that if you stay you might leave anyway and if you don't you'll be unhappy.
Heck, if they layoff is a surprise, ask your boss if you can swap with someone else. They often have the flexibility to do that.
The ultimate form of freedom is being able to decide what you want to do with your time. One way of accomplishing that is making a ridiculous amount of money via a successful exit. Another way is to structure your life so that you're ok with less. Sure, I think most would prefer the 'have lots of money' option, but 1) even there it's easy to get sucked into spending more, as this article mentions, and 2) we have a lot more control over living frugally while earning well (most software engineers earn pretty good money) than we do over a wildly successful exit from a startup.
Find work that has great synergy with your hobbies/interest but is not exactly the same. Either requiring similar skill or being the the same or related field. That way they will fuel each other.
And most importantly, don't try to find meaning in your work (except maybe if you work in non-market driven employments like education/health care but sill beware). That is something a simple farmer that directly interacts with his produce might have experienced but modern capitalism it way too alienating for that to work. Most of the time you wont be even able to tell if you individual output makes any difference and if so for better for worse.
Find meaning outside work.
I was laid off my last job. It was totally expected (I saw it coming, years ahead), and the "forcing function" for me, was encountering the Brick Wall of Silicon Valley Ageism.
It forced me to accept that I was in early retirement; whether or not I liked it.
Turns out, it was the best thing that could have happened to me.
META: He may want to reconsider his choice of thumbnails. I think it's a great one, but Disney has a rather fearsome reputation for going after even the smallest misuses of its IP.
(Or even just changing their job/company within the same profession.)
The layoffs in tech have started. It won't be as bad as the 2001-2004 dot com debacle. Possibly not as bad as the 2008-2012 period was (which wasn't as bad for tech vs the previous downturn, but was just bad overall). If you've prepared then this will be the pause that refreshes. The break you've been needing for a few years now. A time to regroup, learn new things, rethink your priorities. Recessions need not be fearsome things if you've got a good emergency fund and you can live frugally for a while. I used the '01-'04 downturn to go back to school and get a Masters degree. I view that time positively.
The median US dev salary is $73900 using the same search criteria on the same site.
In the UK it is $37000. I'm in the UK and this passes the sniff test as a median base salary.
Obviously it's more if you're in certain industries or work for certain companies (faangs).
US software developers are massively overpayed compared to devs internationally. Devs in the Bay Area are massively overpayed compared to devs in the rest of the USA. You all just haven't realised this yet.
[1]https://www.payscale.com/research/BR/Job=Software_Developer/...
Regardless, that site has some very problematic data. Maybe Brazil does have a lower cost compared to other South American countries, but that site is also claiming Argentinian devs making 3700 USD per year, which is ludicrous. We can't attract even junior ones for any less than 5k per month.
And your payscale site is so far off, it can't be called data.
> US devs don't get paid more than devs in the rest of the world?
How in the world did you come to that conclusion? My only point is that your claim of cheap foreign labor comes from Western privilege.
Speaking to a British company recently and they were trying to hire for a senior web dev role at £40k (<$50,000)
I found that surprising to say the least given that even entry level dev roles in the US pay more than that.
Lesson of the story: embrace remote work.
If you're working for a local company the increased willingness of American companies to hire remote workers is going to raise local dev salaries due to increased competition.
I think this is a good thing. If this also comes at the expense of American devs having their salaries squeezed, frankly I don't care. You're rich. You will be slightly less rich, or even just getting richer at a slightly slower rate.
While some American devs might view this as a personal tragedy, if you subscribe to a maximin view of what a desirable global economic pathway looks like (which I do), then the squeeze on American devs and increased willingness to hire remote workers globally is a good thing.
Life is huge - humongous even and you owe it to yourself to explore.
The world is a very large place. You can succeed in very different ways as long as your provide value. In a lot of situations and places that bar of value is lower than what you are accustomed to.
I've known Billionaire founders who know little about business or code, software engineers who made more money selling shoes online.
W.r.t decisions:
People seem to need these "Walls" that they need to run into to be forced to make a decision about their lives - layoffs, firings, family care issues, health issues etc.
Don't fight it- go with the flow. Use those to do what you really want to do or at least to give it a brief try.
A low cost of living is the only thing that really gives you a robust form of freedom.