Comment by ecshafer

I was a journalist in the old days. With all due respect it was mote than just a job. It was a community, a calling. It felt important. I went out to dinner with my first ever boss and some original colleagues a couple of months ago and had a great time.

>A whole lot more of us are going to get involuntarily put out to pasture through no fault of our own eventually.

And that is going to have predictable consequences like increases in suicides, substance abuse, etc.

A job might "just be a job" but I'm growing tired of this trend online of treating work like it isn't important for most people's sense of worth, place in society, and overall mental health.

I think you should review your equation

reality - expectations - uncertainy = happiness/saddness

It might just be a job but someone living happy in good conditions that feels like the rug might get pulled under them for something they cannot control for is a lot more unerving even if your material conditions work out just fine in the end.

Also I think your being a little atomizing in the impact here. 1 Person losing a job is their problem, I agree. 60 thousand people losing there job is a problem for the government and society. 60K people is a lot and it has a ton of consquences. This is also leading into the prospects of we have these massively profitable corportations who are on the cusp of firing large % of high income people. Whats the tax implication of losing 60K engineering staff level saleries. Its atleast in the billions which is small in the total Federal revenue but if this is a sign of whats to come we have problems. Maybe those people go to different employment but change will effect a lot of local economies.

Granted I know you are really talking about the local emotional effect but the granular net effect is worth the conversation too.

Local journalism _feels_ like more than a job. Before my CS career, I was a photojournalist for a few different daily papers. It felt like important work. We were history keepers and story tellers for a community.

The issue is that several career tracks have some form of low pay, filtering, or outright hazing when you start out, with the promise that if you stick with the program, you will end your career at the top. Medicine, law, etc. If that promise is taken away, a lot of people on the job and in the education pipeline would be questioning whether it was worth the pain points (and not thinking about reforming and improving the entry level experience, lol). In the US this is one of the fears around socialized medicine.

Another problem is those career arcs are so long, where in something like tech or consulting, if you stick with it for 5-8 years you historically have a lot of seniority over new hires.

I agree that it's a job, but.. for most of humanity, people lived and worked in the same spaces with the same humans. The home was a unit of (pre) industrial production. Your neighbours were your partners, or at least involved in general economic activities with you.

Our human brains unsurprisingly still default to that, and it is quite understandable imo.

I tend to agree with the idea that one shouldn't define oneself by a job, especially since one's career is generally dependent on some combination of market forces, institutional gatekeepers, and other factors that are beyond one's control to varying degrees. However, people do tend to put that kind of personal investment into things they spend most of their time on, and especially things they had to spend a long time training for. In order to realize a world where people aren't defined by their career, we would need to first realize a world in which people weren't equal parts encouraged and forced to put most of their time and effort into one, which would require somewhat different economic arrangements than presently exist

Some things are more than just jobs - they are callings. Journalism and teaching are two. People wouldn't do them if they were just jobs, because they don't pay enough to cover the headaches.

ya the trick is to have negative expectations.

Hah I know a professor that retired and never stopped working on his projects. He just stopped handling paperwork at the university.

With all due respect, you're a kid, and not very knowledgeable about the world of careers that differ from yours.

Now, go code something nice.

> it's just a job

Considering what you're responding to, it sounds like you're suggesting people over 55 don't deserve to be respected or have a good position in life.

Is that due respect? That may be your perception of work now, but how many people have much of their self esteem bound up in the work they do at their current place? I want employees and coworkers like that. But what you’re talking about is both life under Late Stage Capitalism and also a bit of blindness as though someone being squeezed by the death of newspapers could just find a different newspaper job.

> let me tell you about health care coverage

I haven't had any coverage in 3 years. It's not the end of the world. People who lose their shit over weird tail risks are missing out on the competitive advantage. You can compensate for the expensive doctors and prescription meds with more exercise and cleaner diets.

I always looked at employer sponsored health care as a sort of trap. I never got involved in it. Every insurance premium I would have paid has gone to a retirement, investment or savings account instead. One big open runway is a lot more useful than a bunch of smaller ones with weird constraints. The idea of a health savings account amuses me.

> you're gonna have to try hard to get a Home Depot job

Things are definitely weird because the current unemployment rate isn't far off 50 year lows: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE

> son let me tell you about health care coverage at non-FAANG companies... it ain't great

Union job will get you good health insurance.

Software probably isn’t that, but if you need health insurance more than cash, be strategic.

If you’re getting screwed on the compensation and it’s important enough to you, think outside the box about the area you work in.

> you're gonna have to try hard to get a Home Depot job

Only the most desperate SWE/HN poster is looking for hourly jobs at Home Depot. I think this is bogus.

I've worked at plenty of non-FAANG companies. Only at those companies, in fact. The health care coverage was fine at most of them.

I’ve been in the industry a long time and benefits at FAANG are not great. Deductibles are high, subsidy pretty average, overall package weak. Earlier in my career I paid nothing for insurance, had a lot of fringe benefits, and I was genuinely grateful for the perks. I’ve looked at ACA alternatives compared to my FAANG benefits and it wasn’t a huge difference frankly - better on the margin but nothing to write home about, at least in my local market.

The fact people have to find a job not for money but for health insurance is about as dystopian as I can imagine. Toil just to not get sick and go broke, not because you need the money. What a sad world we built for ourselves.

This is all a bit out there, but I moved to New Zealand on a working holiday visa, and within two weeks of settling down in a particular spot (after a two month road trip), I had two job offers, one very relaxed retail, and one tech-adjacent for a small civil engineering firm. I'm making about a quarter the take home I did in the US, but I've cut my expenses a lot (bought my car in cash, carpool to work to save gas money, rent a room in a house instead of a whole apartment, no food delivery), and I'm using this time to reevaluate my values and work on building a lifestyle that does not rely on earning a six figure salary.

My plan when I return is to get my EMT and moonlight as an ER tech while doing prerequisites for PA school or maybe medical physics.

> with so many friends going through the layoff/unemployment cycle and hearing their experiences I've concluded it's much more pragmatic to stay in tech.

If so many of your friends are becoming unemployed, isn't this a sign of things to come? If people keep getting laid off in tech, what is the motivation to stay there if you might be next?

Like you, I'm confused by the dreams people post about working low-paid jobs if they're laid off. If the job market is flooded with tech workers, all these jobs will become even more competitive than before, and wages will fall. If you think your own career in tech is actually in danger (as in, you don't think you have any skills that couldn't be fully automated in the near future), I think the best option is getting some different education to put some barrier of certification between yourself and the rest of the desperate job market. But it should be something that's highly employable and difficult to automate, which is a scope that keeps narrowing.

87% of full-time private sector workers have access to employer-subsidized healthcare. On average employers pay 82% of the cost for an individual and 73% of the cost of a family. To use BestBuy as an example: Reddit threads suggest costs range from $100/month (as of 2021) to $250/month (as of 2025).

Often, buyouts terms are more generous than layoff terms. Even if the company has a history of generous layoff terms, the next one may be less generous.

The other thing to consider is if you'll want to keep working at the company after so many people have left due to the buyout and the layoff. If not, taking the buyout and looking for a new job is likely to be better for you than not taking the buyout, not getting laid off, and looking for a new job once you conclude you don't like the new environment. For one thing, you'll probably have buyout compensation and new job compensation at the same time; for another, it may be easier to find a new job if you're in the market before the layoffs increase the hiring pool.

buyouts usually imply a far more generous offer than just termination and severance.

also means they can dodge any NDA / wrongful termination / bad behavior issues on the way out. sign the doc and play nice and get $$$.

keep in mind the US doesn't have great protections in that regard, so "severance" may be them allowing you to collect the last of your crap on the way out and paying you through the end of the week.

Layoff severance isn't great and it's very common for companies to use the performance system to get rid of people. Suddenly someone stops meeting expectations and are gone within weeks.

The first layoff or in this case the first buyout is probably the most generous one.

It really depends on who it's being offered to - if it is literally EVERYONE you need to evaluate it on a case-to-case, but if it's a small targeted group, you probably should take it.

Also if you're a manager you should be able to make it pretty clear.

The interests might be aligned albeit for different reasons. A corporation laying off a huge number of employees is facing reputational damage or regulatory consequences. That doesn’t mean you gain any benefit from their pain. Maybe you could sue for wrongful termination and keep your job?

> I have doubts that this is suitable as a generalized statement like that.

I had doubts too, but it is in ALL CAPS so it must be true?

For most Microsoft employees, the maximum unemployment benefits in most states are a rounding error vs the buyout offer. Here in Missouri it's $320, maxed to 20 weeks. So for most local employees that might get this letter, It's less than a month of salary, and that without accounting for months of health benefits, which I bet the buyout includes.

Unemployment isn’t very much, is it?

I'm not sure if that's true.

It's possible you don't live in the US...?

Generally, in the US, unemployment lasts a few months tops. Regardless of how long you worked, or how long you will be without work.

Heh, wouldn't they get a shock if everybody did though

Well, it’s often a big payout though, and taking it can be a nice bit of cash if you can line up a new job quickly. But I’d be the first to admit that likelihood seems to have plummeted for everyone (except for the geniuses who develop the AI models themselves, who are in a ton of demand.)

Such a great moment to ask for a raise. :)

Things during dotcom crash looked at least this bleak. Easily. It felt like every company on earth (at least in tech) was crashing and firing people. Even high-flyers like Google absolutely stopped hiring.

If you were lucky, you got laid off with a severance. If you weren't, you showed up to work one day and the doors were locked with no notice.

> There has never been a time in last 40 years where being laid off seemed terrifying for knowledge workers in tech.

How about the last several times all of big tech was laying off tons of people at the same time?

I'm not going to disagree with "this time it's different", but I've seen this fear several times before. This time it's AI that's going to take our jobs, and maybe that will happen, but it's not the first threat.

Not sure I understand. If getting laid off in the current environment is extra terrifying then why will people volunteer to get laid off?

Ahhh, I retract my previous statement. I assumed it was "do you want to accept the offer". If it is "do you want to be considered for the offer" that's a little more complicated...

I don't really know the legality of it, but I can tell you that last year around April there was quite a big wave of sudden performance terminations within Microsoft and these people did not get severance. I know because I was a manager of one of these people and had to deliver the news. I know that many of these people had had a below 100 rating on their previous performance review, but we were unaware at the time that this meant a death sentence for these employees several months later when we got the email a few days in advance of the termination. It was hundreds, if not thousands of affected people.

They are making $600k in net income per employee. 10+ years ago, I'd never seen a mass layoff at any company making that kind of money per employee.

Their net income is up more than 2x in just the last 5 years. 10 years ago, Microsoft only had $85B in revenue, now they are up to $134B in net income, and they need to let 25% of the company leave?

But like if your company is making money hand over foot you didn't typically cut staff by 25%. You could just as easily do a hiring freeze and get out ahead of it. I mean if your profit metric is showing all green and growing you have to be really cold to say we need to fire 1/4 people now why? (to maximize shareholders short term value of course)

And one of, if not the most, expensive costs

Such a gross analogy to conflate obesity with supporting slightly more people than you need to financially.

You say that but the economy seems pretty strong to me, we have lower than average unemployment with above average job listings. It's harder if you're on visa otherwise it's pretty competitive

I imagine they don't extend the offer to specific people they want to keep.

I'm still not sure what the advantage to the company of an offer like this is versus layoffs where management gets to choose who leaves, unless they feel the "loyalty test" of deciding to stay is worth more than their own evaluation of employee performance.

> What if all the people they wanted to keep accepted while those they didn't want to keep stayed

That's not an outcome they'd like, but it's an outcome they have to accept, in order to not piss off everyone else.

1. For anyone they want to keep who takes them up on the offer, they always have a chance to try to convince those people to not take the buyout offer.

2. If you make the buyout offer conditional to particular individuals, it will sow resentment and division.

It's generally better for the employees and the employer to do this kind of blanket buyout. If they voluntarily hit the reduction targets, nobody needs to be laid off. If they don't, the layoffs will be there, but smaller. If the 'wrong' people want the buyout, there's still a chance to convince them to stay. If they don't want to stay after the convincing, it's probably best for them to go on their way.

You cannot act with perfect information when you're making an offer to 25% of a company that size. If they were able to and willing to plan this on a per-person basis, they wouldn't be in the position of mass-buyouts.

It's very common in these situations to target every org in the company with a goal of X% reduction. If a small fraction of these teams now need extra headcount, easy enough to allow those teams to hire. Usually you don't keep the severance if you return in under X days.

I've personally been laid off, only for the post-re-org team to hire several people, including asking to rehire me. It's rare, and those affected should probably plan to find new jobs, but it happens.

But with the job market the way it is, they could re-hire at a lower compensation?

The buyout is generating unknown information. How well does the company perform without x random employees removed.

typically in that case the boomerang is they come back but as a consultant. just doing the same thing they were doing before but at a different rate. usually higher to cover health ins plus a bit of a bonus.

Yes, but companies realise the important cogs much later in the process.

> A rational company

I've never worked at a rational company. I'm not sure that's a thing.