Comment by seizethecheese
19 hours ago
My dad was a newspaper reporter in the early 2000s, so there were several dinner table conversations about this dilemma.
The buyouts were taken by superstars and low performers. The superstars moved on to other things, like working in other forms of media.
Dad didn't take several rounds of buyouts and was fine.
After suffering a stroke, he was "put out to pasture", which for a journalist means he was sent to cover city hall meetings in some suburb. Eventually, he retired with some much smaller payout than what the last buyout would have given him. The sense in the family was that the collapse of the industry denied him a dignified last decade of work. (When the industry was flush with cash, older journalists were sort of like "elder statesmen" in the newsroom. Post-internet, no longer.)
With all due respect, it's just a job, and we would do well to remember that. Chasing status and respect through work will lead to sadness (reality - expectations = happiness).
I think we should buy people out with reasonable comp and let them live the rest of their life doing something that brings them joy and happiness, even if that's volunteering in what they used to get paid for. But I'm not a policymaker.
A whole lot more of us are going to get involuntarily put out to pasture through no fault of our own eventually.
'I've applied for 300 jobs. My 25 years' experience is worthless' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50182823 - October 2026 (111 comments)
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.
I wonder if it's just me, but before the 2000s, a lot of jobs felt important, society felt important, institutions felt important.. it's evaporating now.
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I would say the problem is that it NOW is just a job... it used to be the fourth estate
Without getting too political, these were the days when the press controlled information and appointed themselves arbiters and gatekeepes of information.
The internet and free information showed them up for what they really were: biased cavemen like everyone else, and the aura vanished.
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Lol, how righteous! You were a propagandist for state and company, full of lies and half truths. The amount main stream journalism has gotten wrong in the last two decades wouldn't fit on the side of a bus, you ran cover for the powerful and destroyed anyone they deemed a threat. And you've been purely ideological without any regard for reason or truth. I'm glad journalism is dying, it's been too corrupt for too long.
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It had an aura precisely because journalists were the arbitrators of truth, so denial of real information elevated it
>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.
Your sense of worth should not be tied up in your job.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/03/31/deathbed-wish/
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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.
I like your comment but I think you're generalizing too a bit in a different way. It's 60k people spread in different countries, at least four. It is still a big problem, but it's not "the tax implication of losing 60k salaries" for a single government
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> 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
Muh job creators! You can't tax your way to growth!
Well actually, they are now job destroyers. Tax the fuckers.
Equation comes from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50195502 - October 2026
(i am once again asking to think in systems)
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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.
It is important work, but we have yet to find an economic model to effectively support it and the people doing the work.
(i donate to journalism orgs across the US [ProPublica, Associated Press, Tampa Bay Times, Salt Lake Tribune, Marion County Record, Muckrock], but far more and consistent financial support is needed than these orgs are receiving today)
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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.
Just 300? I’m at about 2000-3000. Just got my latest rejection after 5 rounds and 3 weeks.
At this point I can’t afford to apply to tech jobs anymore. They require you to be available for an hour randomly across multiple days and have shit like the ceo “needing” to meet you and then rescheduling last second because something more important than you came up.
All the jobs available to someone changing career right now give you maybe a days head up on your schedule and a 30 minute lunch if your lucky.
The interview process for tech has become a class barrier in of itself
ya the trick is to have negative expectations.
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.
Hah I know a professor that retired and never stopped working on his projects. He just stopped handling paperwork at the university.
The dream, when possible: to continue to perform work one enjoys without an economic requirement or component. It would be great if we could do this for more people, whenever possible, via systems.
> 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.
> I think we should buy people out with reasonable comp and let them live the rest of their life doing something that brings them joy and happiness, even if that's volunteering in what they used to get paid for. But I'm not a policymaker.
Respect is how you feel, a good position in life is a function of your retirement benefits and financial comfort. If the market has no place for these folks anymore, and we're not offering a permanent jobs bank to keep people working who want to work (which I absolutely think we should do), "it is what it is." Sorry if they feel bad about market changes and demand for certain skills and labor.
We show respect by packaging folks out to live comfortable remainders of their life. "Thank you for your contribution and service." Lack of respect is leaving them hanging in the wind financially, not words. If you need a job to feel needed and respected after entering retirement and with sufficient financial and retiree benefits support, we'll throw a standing appointment with a therapist into the package and/or a volunteer opportunity online board/bank.
If you're looking for validation from your job or your work as a component of your identity, you're going to end up sad. That's a choice. Make better choices if you don't want to be sad.
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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.