HN Explorer

Ask HN: Does anyone feel secure in their job?

17 points by csholb ↗ HN
I’ve been in SV for almost 10 years working in software and I’ve never really felt secure in my job. No matter where I go, big companies, startups, companies in between, there is always something that keeps me up at night, knowing it could all be over tomorrow for any reason.

A big part of why I feel this way is I always want to be in a position where the skills I am able to offer are in demand, and that I am always good enough at those skills to allow me to get work when I want or need it. In practice this is difficult to achieve and more often than not I’m always left feeling like I could be better, that I should study more, maybe I’m not cut out for this, etc…

I’ve always been a good contributor at the companies I’ve worked at, but I struggle with interviewing which makes the prospect of needing to find work even that more daunting.

Has anyone else felt this way and then done something to change how it makes you feel? I don’t want to devote all of my time to improving skills for work, but I also hate feeling inadequate.

18 comments

[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 49.1 ms ] thread
neonlights84
Got laid off in August right before my wedding. Thankfully found a job quickly, but the lesson I've ingrained is that (at least in America) you can do your best possible job and still end up on the chopping block. It's very bothersome. I suffer from anxiety and have trouble compartmentalizing my daily struggles. I have trouble sleeping at night. The rat race is exhausting.
p1esk
Do you have 12 months or more in savings? If not, that’s why. 12 months should be enough to find another job, even when economy is bad.
swagasaurus-rex
What if the economy is really bad?
toast0
Move in with your parents / siblings / someone?
jjice
So bad that you can't find a job for 12 months? At a certain point, you take any job you can get to sustain yourself while you look for a job in your field. You should be able to buy yourself plenty of time to focus full-time on searching for a new job and the chances you go 12 months is highly unlikely. Still, if that were to happen, take on another job you don't love while you continue your search.

That said, not finding a job in your field for 12 months is a situation we as people like to prepare for, but are likely to not happen.

datadrivenangel
If the economy looks super bad, dramatically cut spending to stretch out the last 6 months. At a certain point you can also negotiate with lenders or just not pay.
mmvasq
If you are female in Shell, save all your money by 49 and be ready to retire if you have retired from the company. No further tech gigs.

They have some dudes in supply chain who play dirty games over other women who went to arbitration (was not me..never been to arbitration). Will be impossible to have them caught. You will have no dignity when they are done. It is complicated how they do it and at best you will wind up with a best guess of involved parties as there is no legal support in the EEOC after 365 days they will wait.

Some of the involved aren’t even with the company. They have a fully repeatable process for tech workers.

nickd2001
An old joke: Q: What's the difference between a contractor and a permie? A: The contractor KNOWS they have no job security. IMHO after working years in tech - your only real job security is your skillset. OTOH, working in public sector can be quite secure, and a good idea while kids are growing up.
Jemaclus
I generally feel secure in my role (Director-level) with respect to things that are within the control of my boss and myself. My company is doing _okay_, and I bring a certain level of expertise that surpasses many of my peers and the folks that I'm responsible for, so that gives me a certain level of comfort in knowing that they can't really fire me. My boss has told me straight out that he can't lose me, to the point where he's advocated against his superiors firing _other_ people because I wouldn't like that, and if I don't like it, I might leave, and I can't leave because then he'd be screwed.

So in that respect, I feel fairly secure. But my boss doesn't control the purse strings and there's a chance that I could be on the chopping block if there are layoffs or if the company goes under. I don't think those concerns ever really go away, though.

cableshaft
I've worked for multiple failed startups and in game dev (which seems to like to lay a bunch of people off shortly after a game is released). I've been laid off from more companies than I've not, at this point.

I just kind of assume it's going to happen at some point. I even found out I narrowly avoided being laid off at my previous company at a large corporation. I was on the list for their first layoff (which was like 6 months after I joined, I was still the 3rd most recent engineering hire) but someone else in the department quit which allowed my manager to not have to include me. I then survived two other layoff rounds at that company.

And I survived a layoff round at my current company as well, although it was a fairly small layoff to begin with and I'm making them money directly as a consultant staffed on a project so they didn't have much reason to lay me off anyway.

hiAndrewQuinn
I feel reasonably secure in my job, but I live in little Finland, where my salary is a third of what it would likely be in an equivalent position in the States. This changes the calculus quite a bit.

For example, I'm part of a thing called an unemployment fund, which mostly guarantees that I will recieve about 50% of my income for ten months if I happen to get fired tomorrow. My family gets by quite comfortably on about half of my take home pay, and I invest the other half, so as long as I don't give into lifestyle inflation we're essentially safe for at least that long before we have to start dipping into our savings.

At the same time, when I lived in the United States my savings rate was closer to 80%, which meant every month of working potentially paid for 5 months of maintaining my lifestyle. Within 3 months I would have already had a stronger safety net than I currently have here.

Either way, runway is the thing that really matters for a feeling of financial, and hence professional, safety. You will almost certainly land some kind of new job within 6 months if from the beginning you take the job search seriously - but you have to be able to rely on yourself to last those 6 months. You can't fall into despair about it.

kypro
Tech I think is particularly bad for people feeling insecure. We act like it's normal and shame those who don't do this, but the idea of having to constantly revamp your skillset every ~5-10 years to remain employable is not normal. My dad has been a lorry (truck) driver for 40 years, and aside from a few changes in vehicle tech nothing has really changed much for him.

I know some people who had great tech jobs in the 90s, but those skills are now obsolete. I see people even today who I'm convinced won't be employable in a few years. For example, there was a guy at the last place I worked who just wrote HTML and basic JQuery code for one of our legacy products. He had been doing this for 10+ years, and recently it was announced that they would soon be pulling the plug on that product. I don't know what that guy is going to do – realistically no one is hiring for HTML and basic javascript today.

My opinion is that non of us in tech should feel secure. I've seen some really brutal layoffs over the course of my career where even the most value people are chopped because an order has come from above. You could be the most valuable person on your team by far, but if the company no longer deems your project needed or your skillset can be outsourced for much cheaper then non of it really matters.

I feel sorry for people who aren't geeks in this industry to be honest. I find I can upskill quite easily just because I enjoy tech so want to learn new things. But I understand that most people probably don't want to finish work to continue working on personal projects that require learning new skills.

My advice to everyone in this industry is to just enjoy it while it lasts and to build up savings. That's really the only way you can reduce stress and feel any sense of security.

nickd2001
This is all true and good advice. I'd add to this that as a survival strategy, one can develop the meta-skill, of being able to spot which tech skills are fads, and which "have legs" (will be around for a long time). Anything from a specific vendor, you're at the mercy of what that vendor does, corporate takeovers etc. Whereas open source things are a lot better. There's also the idea that stuff that's been around ages, is likely to stay around ages, whereas new stuff you may not know yet. My vim (originally vi) skills, command line and sql have served me well iterally 32 years. Not really changed that much in that time. Python has done me proud for 20 years and no sign of going away. json and git probably here to stay. Ones to avoid are the likes of javascript frameworks. Some stuff fashionable on HN probably not gonna stay. Back in the day, *nix , usually Linux, was a brilliant investment. Unfortunately the waters have got muddied now by running in the cloud which has vendor lock-in. I do a lot of AWS these days, with a niggling concern that Amazon can totally change this and pull the plug when they feel like it. If you work in a large corporation which wraps tech in their own internal tooling, that can be a problem , causing you to get de-skilled. So, something else to avoid.
datadrivenangel
I have career security, not job security. Finding new work is fairly straightforward, even if any specific role may go up in smoke at almost any time.

I find having a robust emergency fund reduces the anxiety. For the feelings of inadequacy, I suggest teaching and mentoring, and maybe also therapy. if you've been doing software in SV for 10 years, you're so far ahead of most people who want to get paid software, you shouldn't feel more a little bit of constant pressure to be staying up to date.

Quinzel
Yes I feel very secure in my job. It’s probably the only aspect of my life that feels truely secure.

I was lucky to fall into a super niche area of healthcare where there is a high demand for my services and a lack of people trained and qualified to do my job.