The Toll of Layoff Anxiety
bbc.com
bbc.com
Leadership held an all-hands meeting letting people know that layoffs were coming, and the VP of each person's respective area would walk over to their desk to inform them personally.
On the day of the layoffs, you could feel the stress in the air. Not much smiling, except the forced kind after someone tries to break the tension with a joke.
And then, a door at the end of a row of cubes opens and your VP walks into the area. Everyone wonders if they're the one (they've been wondering since they learned of the layoff, but something changes when the agent of termination literally walks through the door). She walks down your row, nearing your desk, and your heart starts pounding. She keeps walking, and you breathe a sigh of relief. You peek over the edge of your cube to see her talking to Joe, and a few minutes later he is escorted from the premises.
A few minutes later, she walks into the area again, and the cycle of stress repeats.
I survived the cut, but the experience still sits with me. I don't remember much about any specific day during my next half-decade there, but I remember that day like it was yesterday.
I know some of the recent layoffs have been handled terribly, but I never again want to be sitting in my cube, wondering if I'm next every time the door down the hallway opens.
There are so many other ways to handle this that will retain the employee's dignity but still mitigate any risk they might kick off.
It's as though people think that managers go behind closed doors and it's suddenly like the Death Star conference room.
> “This whole concept of working from anywhere went too far,” Mr. Ulbrich said. “I’m all into flexibility and all supportive that work and life has to find a flexible kind of partnership…but that doesn’t translate into, ‘Mondays and Fridays, I always work from home.’ ”
> He added: “I think the recent trends, the layoffs, will help to bring a little bit of balance into that.”
And frankly, people have come up with a lot more cruel things to do to other human beings than just dismissing them in a deliberately humiliating way.
It’s optimistic that everyone would act rationally and in good faith. I wish it were that way.
Incidentally I recall a coworker quitting quite colorfully blasting some music from his phone and loudly declaring goodbyes to people. Our head of security was following him around half-anxious, half-annoyed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn2Xf9hAFcE&ab_channel=Weyla...
It may not have been proprietary, but it does speak to why they walk people out under guard. Maybe he had good intent, as proven by how he handed it to his staff to look at in the elevator, but if that staff hadn’t stopped to thank him, that USB data would be in the wind.
Not long ago the tech company I work at announced layoffs and for everyone to expect an email with whether they've been laid off or not. Most stressful 15 minutes of my whole career.
In from the UK and earn about a quarter as much and I could be unemployed for several years before I had to start caring.
I'm not trying to brag. My salary is shit compared to the US. Just genuinely curious.
Luckily you live in a still mostly civilized society, where you don't lose your health care when you lose your job, and you have a decent welfare program so you don't lose your house and can still eat.
We don't have that here. Also, in the Bay Area, $300K will barely get you by if you bought a house in the last five years.
And like with a lot of "new money" experiences, the answer to your question is: no. You get excited to taste a luxury lifestyle and get carried away buying an dangerously expensive house because it fits your Peleton and your bank says you're good for it. With this being your first time through a tech boom, you didn't believe the old cynics telling you there was a second act coming. But now you might get laid off and have $15,000 per month in bills to pay lest that house go back to the bank.
It's an understandable story, and a tragic one. :(
In addition to the other responses, two major factors for me:
1. At the time, I wasn’t making anywhere close to that salary. The tech job market in my region at the time didn’t pay anywhere close to SV salaries, and even less as someone working tech at a non-tech company.
2. I only had a few years of decent earnings at that point, and was funneling most extra funds into debt.
Having enough savings to quit for a few years is amazing, but a privilege that few people have.
Imagine a tech couple earning >$400k, combined income after tax about 20k a month. Awesome right?
Now they need a house with square footage for kids to play and sleep, a home office, and close enough to downtown to maximize family time.
That housing runs at least 5k/mo. A nanny is another 5k. Add in food, bills, transportation, a few yearly trips to see grandma, another 5k.
Said couple might be saving 50k/year. Great! And after a few frugal years together that makes a 10-20% home down payment and they can start their family.
But even though they're both well paid, they're really twice as vulnerable. Either one losing their job puts them at a rapid household burn rate.
Something will have to give. The Nanny loses their job, trapping one parent into a caregiving role. Or they can no longer afford flights to see family. Etc.
Fertility rates and birth defects forced our hand. Saving longer just raises your chances of holding nothing but blood and ashes at the end.
We do quite well, living well within our means, allowing us to be able to cover these types of big once-in-a-home owner’s lifetime surprises, but a layoff could mean we’re simply making the place nice for the next folks while we bail out to find something new.
Life ain’t cheap and the social safety net has been used and abused to the point bad timing can destroy everything you’ve worked for with one unexpected meeting with HR on some random Tuesday.
Nothing’s ‘wrong’ with it but it does make it hard to empathise with someone who subjects themselves to that lifestyle then worries about being laid off.
From some people’s perspective a pricey depreciating car just represents a choice to shorten your runway if things go wrong.
I have a large extended family who all make far less than me. Yes, they have plenty of kids, too.
Their secret is living outside of a tech hub, and near family. It takes a village to raise a child. Their village is free, mine isn't.
> when I look around where I live I see people are just outright mismanaging their money with frivolous luxury items
No offense, but you're either a robot or a sociopath. "Frivolity" is often what motivates humans to get out of bed and go to work, rather than sink into something like substance abuse.
I, personally, budget about $10k/y for motorcycles and art, which are definitely frivolous personal pleasures that don't directly benefit my family. Except it brings me joy, and who knows how productive or alive I'd be without it.
Hoard your treasure in a cave like a dragon if you choose, but spitting on others for finding a different balance is definitely unempathetic.
We are very privileged to have the money for a nanny. Having to let go of a wonderful employee and friend is itself worth plenty of anxiety.
And we're lucky enough to be citizens. Plenty of folks in our situation aren't.
That's not even anecdata, that's just first glance impressions!
This is what is really dangerous about remote work to the status quo: if I take a SWE salary to a low CoL area, I don’t have the same pressure to burn through it like in a tech hub. I can live comfortably compared to my neighbours and still save. This gives big business far less leverage.
$200-300k is not normal in the US and if you are getting fired from one of the few firms paying that much you might have some elevated anxiety that it will take a lot of effort to find another job with such a pay and perks.
But if you are a part of a massive layoff and you read that other such firms are going through layoffs too then you are really afraid that you might not be able to get an equivalent job in the near future as your former colleagues will be competing with you for the reduced number of these high-paying jobs left.
I used to work at a hedge fund that basically screened for mental health during hiring. When we had layoffs, nobody freaked out. We knew we had a good run, we knew severance was good and we knew we'd be highly desirable in the market. So we metabolized the layoffs and went on with our lives.
My job after that was at a scale up that leaned woke (a lot of employees were sold a tenuous connection between our work and a feel good mission). When layoffs happened, it was basically an all out mental health crisis, with everyone feeding into everyone else's anxiety. The facts weren't that different than at the hedge fund but the amount of angst and freaking out was through the roof.
Now at a FAANG, obviously had layoffs recently. The emotional vibe is somewhere between the two above. Coworkers that came from tougher places (finance, Microsoft, Amazon) are holding it together fine. Others are not.
I once heard the analogy of an orange. When you squeeze an orange, orange juice comes out because that's what an orange is made off. If extreme anxiety comes out when you are squeezed, it was there all along.
Can we offer them some understanding and sympathy?
> promise them unprecedented compensation
They were promised and received uncompensated compensation. No promises of indefinite employment were ever given, and it’s a bit naive to assume boom times never end. I think it’s fair to make this point too, even if on an individual level I sympathize with pretty much anyone that loses their job.
Obviously this is going to happen, I am not shocked or surprised and I get how it can cause anxiety to emerge.
I do think there's a connection between resilience (as you observed in your other response) and entitlement. I am not sure which way causality flows but you wrote: "promise them unprecedented compensation" - I feel like there's also a realistic mindset that should go with interpreting that: I am hired to do a job and things could change (vs something like I get this comp because the universe knows I am the shit or something like that)
If you make over 200k a year in a booming market, no.
Are you some sort of bad person for making what the market pays you?
It reeks of jealousy and brazen callousness because someone has secured compensation outside their reach or imagination.
I don’t get it.
First, everybody is capable of anxiety and that's normal and to be expected in the current climate.
> a scale up that leaned woke [...] When layoffs happened, it was basically an all out mental health crisis, with everyone feeding into everyone else's anxiety.
Second, having an anxiety disorder is not a moral or behavioral failure and I don't see necessarily how it could be correlated to "wokeness".
> When you squeeze an orange, orange juice comes out because that's what an orange is made off. If extreme anxiety comes out when you are squeezed, it was there all along.
Again, this analogy doesn't make sense. It's totally normal for oranges to be full of orange juice. It would be weird if something else (or no thing at all) came out... Same with anxiety - it's normal for people to be stressed out in a stressful situation. It's not necessarily healthy, but should be expected.
Otoh, having an anxiety disorder is not a normal psychological state, but that's something that shows up all the time, not just when you're "squeezed".
You’re right that this doesn’t mean that people who are more anxious have somehow failed morally or behaviorally, and also right that nobody is immune to anxiety altogether.
But I don’t think they were saying those things. They were just saying that some people are capable of navigating stuff like job loss with confidence and sharing their experience of environments that seemed to have proportionately more or less of those people.
I do think that on net it read as dismissive to the real personal experience of the “oranges” who are highlighted in the article, but also think you’re responding to things that weren’t said there.
You are exactly right in what I am saying and there's a part of me that hopes some people are inspired by this information to build up their resilience
This may be true, but I think that this is also something that can be learned, at least to a good degree. Personally I feel I have managed to become less anxiety-prone through conscious effort and introspective work. Being an "orange" is not an immutable fact.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/unique-everybody-els...
(References at the bottom)
Selection bias in your data is a huge problem.
> scale up that leaned woke [...] feel good mission [...] all out mental health crisis [...]
> FAANG [...] emotional vibe is somewhere between the two [...] Coworkers that came from tougher places (finance, Microsoft, Amazon) are holding it together fine. Others are not.
Rather than attributing this to some employees being made of more-anxious stuff, could this also be explained by:
* Concern about personal financial safety net (war chest, family money, connections, job market for them at that time)?
* Concern about being able to find another work situation that they like (including perceived woke feel-good mission, and like-minded colleagues, for those people)?
If you don't have family that can help you and you grew up eating out of soup kitchens, you're going to have a very different attitude to the prospect of job loss (even if you're "making decent money" at one of these "woke companies") than someone who comes from money and didn't have these issues growing up.
You're less likely to take risks, and you're more likely to pursue more secure careers (tech being a good one of late).
Now that tech is not looking so safe anymore, of course there are a lot of people who are having full on crises.
Dismissing those people as "being made of anxiety" fails to acknowledge the factors that caused the situation in the first place. Sure, someone with a wealthy family isn't freaking out right now, and they're probably less anxious in general. They have good reason to not care about maybe getting laid off, just as the people who are quite worried about it have good reasons to be anxious about getting laid off
1. A global pandemic that has killed nearly 7 million people worldwide.
2. The start of a large war between a nuclear power and a country in Europe supported by another nuclear power.
3. Minor thing, an attempt to overthrow the US government.
Perhaps anxiety accumulates?
i wonder what "very major" problems are for you if these are "very minor".
1. Also plenty upside (eg normalization of working from home) that has impacted most ppl I know very directly.
2. Yes but also doesn't impact us on daily basis and whether we think about it a lot or none at all doesn't change anything.
3. Lol.
As if mental health couldn't negatively change in a matter of weeks or months.
This rings true to me too. Another factor I'll highlight is the average age of the employees. I'm older than most of those I work with. I've been through rounds of layoffs at other companies. It's stressful, but I know how it happens and what to expect. A lot of them have worked their entire careers at successful companies during good times. They're freaking out because they haven't been through it before.
I'm at a good point where I'm wrapping a bunch of stuff up. So I've been trying to make sure I tie up all loose ends and make sure, if the axe lands on my neck, that my colleagues can pick up everything where I left off. After round one, it wasn't the anxiety (I'm in a good spot, companies are hungry to poach from tech companies like mine; I'll land on my feet), it was the lack of will to really work too terribly hard until I knew that I'd be sticking around.
I still don't know. So I'm not working overly hard of late. I have started to see people I know get the axe though, and that has an effect on you. I'm only working hard on wrap-up activities, and turning down new big stuff.
Congrats (Big Company), you played yourself. Want to keep morale up? Don't hire a shit ton of people, and then fire a shit ton of people a few months later.
My code commits are up, my bug finds are significantly higher, and I’ve taken on educational and sales initiatives to drive adoption and revenue in much bigger ways.
I was a poor Welfare kid who never had any idea about seeing the money I have in tech. Now, even though I’ve got 6 months of savings and skills that I’m sure will land me just fine, I’m pushing harder after watching a 25% layoff happen and seemingly more low-profile layoffs and reorganization.
It weird the first time you get paid a SV compensation, but live in the Midwest, making your income stretch, saving, and getting a few nice things: there’s still that inner poor kid who isn’t sure where the next meal’s coming from, or if you’d be able to pay for vehicle repairs or get your kids’ braces taken care of; all things that seemed unimaginable just five years back working IT regionally.
There’s the underlying fear that it’s all going to go away and you’ll be back to paycheck-to-paycheck after learning life doesn’t have to be that way.
That’s what keeps me motivated; I cha fed my stars, and I’m looking to make sure I keep them changed and give my kids a life I couldn’t have fathomed.
So, I push harder and work even more to make sure my place at the table is either secured, or a great portfolio to have on hand to show the next place.
I can’t tell if this is noble or pathological, but I know I’m stretched thin emotionally and am not sleeping because of it. Here it is 3AM, the soul’s midnight, and I’m thinking about a few projects I still need to do initial commits on and start some regression testing…
Bah.
Tomorrow…er, later today, right?
And on my weekend even.
Definitely pathological.
That is: perhaps unemployment isn’t the cause, but financial peril is. And maybe half-decent social systems that mitigate financial peril in the face of unemployment could have an effect.
If you identify too much with your job, losing it is an attack on your ego and it damages your sense of who you are. It's like you died; the role you played in a whole network of social relations is gone. Your status and importance, if you mentally invested yourself in it, is diminished, possibly to irrelevance. You're a nobody.
I think this kind of mindset can push someone over the edge.
I guess then it’s a good thing that USA is seeing some of the lowest unemployment rates in decades. Unemployment hasn’t been this low since 1969[1].
Even the tech sector where we’re seeing layoffs is doing pretty well. Tech unemployment rate is estimated at 1.8% for January 2023 [2]
[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate
[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/economy/2023/02/07/tech...
https://www.edhovee.com/edhblog/2020/5/6/more-deaths-from-un...
The actual paragraph of interest from the 2005 book is this: “According to one study [the one by Bluestone et al.], a 1 percent increase in the unemployment rate will be associated with 37,000 deaths (including 20,000 heart attacks), 920 suicides, 650 homicides, 4,000 state mental hospital admissions and 3,300 state prison admissions.”
Actually the author of that post thinks the number is higher at 47,500 based on data:
And the impact likely is now greater than estimated by Bluestone, Harrison, and Baker nearly 40 years ago. With this updated analysis, a more current estimate appears to be more in the range of 47,500 deaths for every 1% point increase in America’s average annual unemployment rate.
The company is doing very bad now. What was once our manager is now scraping by, doing database administration and fixing some bugs, as he's the only one left from our former team, and there's a government obligation to keep the system running. He stayed because he has stocks in the company that have plummeted, but he's still hopeful. He sometimes asks for our help, even after a decade, and sometimes we hop on and help him with something for the sake of old times.
I don't feel particularly worried about my job, but multiple people at the table reported extreme anxiety over the layoffs, and I imagine that's more often than not the case
I'm not offering a solution, but trying to point at the problem and create awareness that pure job security in exchange for nothing is a pipedream like getting in shape without working out. Locking down a job so you can be secure discourages hiring in the first place and encourages economic sclerosis.
My anxiety has been sky-high - nothing like being shocked out of sleep at 4:50 am when your alarm doesn't even go off till six most days.