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The hero's journey of getting laid off

backtohumanity.substack.com

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Re: The hero's journey of getting laid off

#11

Post by troelsSteegin »

tra3 wrote: post #3

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…

from [0]: Each event is assigned a “Life Change Unit” score. These are then added together over a year and used to predict your risk of illness.

So, it's a scale on a predictor of health impacts, vs say a measure of intensity.

Re: The hero's journey of getting laid off

#12

Post by CraigJPerry »

OrangeMonkey wrote: post #4

I'm sorry, but I can't disagree more strongly. 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 fami…

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.

Re: The hero's journey of getting laid off

#13

Post by georgex7 »

duxup wrote: post #8

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…

WOW what a story. And what an epic layoff package ;)

Re: The hero's journey of getting laid off

#15

Post by wonderwonder »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #12
OrangeMonkey wrote: post #4

I'm sorry, but I can't disagree more strongly. 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 fami…

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…

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.

Re: The hero's journey of getting laid off

#16

Post by ge96 »

colechristensen wrote: post #5
kache_ wrote: post #2

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.

Yeah I'm looking forward to being free (fire). Right now it's like "ugh gotta get through my 9-5 before I can do what I want to do".

Still I'm fortunate/could be worse.

Re: The hero's journey of getting laid off

#17

Post by georgex7 »

OrangeMonkey wrote: post #4

I'm sorry, but I can't disagree more strongly. 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 fami…

> Getting laid off is a traumatic event.

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.

Re: The hero's journey of getting laid off

#18

Post by mysterydip »

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.

Re: The hero's journey of getting laid off

#19

Post by brightball »

georgex7 wrote: post #13
duxup wrote: post #8

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…

WOW what a story. And what an epic layoff package ;)

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.

Re: The hero's journey of getting laid off

#20

Post by georgex7 »

mysterydip wrote: post #18

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.

Awesome :)
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