Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The hero's journey of getting laid off

backtohumanity.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 107 posts

Re: The hero's journey of getting laid off

#71

Post by r_hoods_ghost »

snapetom wrote: post #64
r_hoods_ghost wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 employ…

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.

[1]https://www.payscale.com/research/BR/Job=Software_Developer/...

Re: The hero's journey of getting laid off

#72

Post by paulcole »

georgex7 wrote: post #26
paulcole wrote: post #9

> 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-…

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 the…

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.

Re: The hero's journey of getting laid off

#73

Post by scarby2 »

the_af wrote: post #41
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…

Awesome that it worked out for you! That said, 9 months of pay as severance for 20 years of work seems a bit disappointing. In my country it's currently one month of pay per year worked for layoffs where the employee was not at fault.

where is this? I've lived a few places and never heard of something so generous.

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.

Re: The hero's journey of getting laid off

#74

Post by sleepdreamy »

aetherson wrote: post #32
diob wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Re: The hero's journey of getting laid off

#75

Post by cableshaft »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #33
georgex7 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

At my last corporation, they had severance set at 1 week of pay per year worked, up to a max of 4 weeks for 4 years worked.

It all depends on the corporation.

Re: The hero's journey of getting laid off

#76

Post by christkv »

scarby2 wrote: post #73
the_af wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome that it worked out for you! That said, 9 months of pay as severance for 20 years of work seems a bit disappointing. In my country it's currently one month of pay per year worked for layoffs where the employee was not at fault.

where is this? I've lived a few places and never heard of something so generous. 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.

In Spain it’s 22 days per year worked up to 24 months I think. But the pay is also exempt from income tax.

Re: The hero's journey of getting laid off

#77

Post by Cd00d »

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…

My dad always said the three most stressful things were:

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.

Re: The hero's journey of getting laid off

#78

Post by badpun »

diob wrote: post #27
colechristensen wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is much less of a nightmare if you're prepared for this kind of predicable eventuality. 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.

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.

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.

Re: The hero's journey of getting laid off

#79

Post by tra3 »

bitL wrote: post #60
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…

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.

Re: The hero's journey of getting laid off

#80

Post by nickd2001 »

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.
Post reply on HN