Layoff Thinking

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.

> 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?"

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.

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.]

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.