[sem000]

I definitely feel for the people getting laid off...

But hear me out, I think this is going to be a good thing for those people and the economy.

The achievers that are getting laid off now have the opportunity, or are forced, to take that risk to start their own thing and create tremendously more value to the world than they would have at Meta. Alternatively, they could take their tremendous skills to industries and sectors that could really use them and make transformative changes there.

[folkrav]

> I think this is going to be a good thing for those people

I want to see you say "You losing your job is actually freaking great!" to the face of one of to those 10k employees who now have to figure out how to pay the next couple of months' mortgage while they try to find a job in a now cautious market overflowing with laid off employees. And please, make sure to tell them it's good for the economy, that should make them even happier.

You cannot seriously be saying you feel for them and tell them them losing their livelihood in this economy is good for them either. Not everyone wants to have a high impact transformative job or change the world. Tons of people - I'd say most - work to pay the bills.

[tomrod]

I was laid off in the Great Financial Crisis and was very early career. Honestly, I was angry at the employer for a few years. Eventually I got over it, and it inspired me to become more resilient & diversified in income. I've had clients, customers, and employers end relationships since, some hard stops and some soft stops. I don't get ruffled anymore by it, and knowing myself without that first layoff in early career I'd not be nearly as able to bounce back after processing.

It's not easy. I wish all the best to the folks who have been laid off -- it sucks, its hard, and really can be nerve wracking.

A few suggestions:

- Register for unemployment right away

- If you have tight constraints on resources (such as low bank account and food/housing affordability) reach out in your network right away -- people, community organizations, food banks, religious organizations if you are an adherent (my biased experience is they tend to be insular with help).

- Junior career or low network cultivation - pound the street, apply to what feels like an uncomfortably crazy number of jobs

- Mid to senior career or high network cultivation - pound the street, connect with what feels like an uncomfortably crazy number of people, even second degree connections

All the best to yall.

[folkrav]

All great advice to make the best of a shitty situation. My comment was more about how tired I'm getting of that same age old "it's better for everyone this way!i!" BS line that doesn't help anyone. The situation is legitimately shitty, tons of people's lives will be, objectively speaking, negatively influenced by this from no fault of their own. Can we just stop pretending like it isn't shitty?

My personal finances are fine, I have decent income and savings, am decently protected in case of a layoff, and I'm not in a situation where I was laid off either. Actually myself had to announce it to 2 people from my team recently. I'm not angry at the employer in particular - don't hate the player, hate the game, blabla. I'm more generally angry at the way we choose to live in having no basis in humanity and no other reality than shareholders' wallets - seriously, who did _not_ know that the hiring rate of the last couple of years would not hold? - but that's another story.

[pb7]

>now have to figure out how to pay the next couple of months' mortgage

If I had to guess, probably with the surplus of their previous massive compensations and extremely generous severance.

[folkrav]

Kind of missing the forest for the trees here.

But okay, let's play that game. The 21k employees they laid off were _all_ high comp workers, really? The 150k employees that got laid off since the beginning of the year, just in tech? The slightly smaller amount from last year? All those workers from other industries? Come the F on.

[pb7]

The severance just continues their normal paychecks for several months. Either they were able to pay their mortgages while they were employed or they weren't, but nothing will have changed for the next few months as they job search.

[folkrav]

Again, you're assuming quite a whole lot, and ignoring just as much. The 150k people I mentioned were laid off just this year all were obviously not all high compensation/high severance package people[0].

> 1 in 3 laid-off workers received severance pay—worth 16 weeks’ pay, on average > Only 1 in 3 recently laid-off workers received severance pay, but those who did received 16 weeks’ worth of pay, on average. That far exceeds the current median unemployment duration of about 9 weeks, and may partly explain why unemployment insurance rolls haven’t swelled more substantially in response to recent mass layoffs. > Workers in financial services (57%), technology (56%), advertising & marketing (49%), and real estate (48%) were the most likely to have received severance.

The market is also saturated with laid off employees, so job search takes time. Companies are actually hiring more H1Bs than last year despite the layoffs, meaning even less roles for citizens/locals[1]. H1Bs touched by layoffs have to find new work inside 60 days. In this economy, tons of companies are on a hiring freeze, so even less opportunities. And I'm only talking about tech in this particular comment, but these layoffs have been happening on a much larger scale in multiple fields (although tech was hit particularly hard).

I don't understand what there is to gain by pretending like everyone's better off that way. The only winners in this whole crap are the companies laying off people, and that minority sliver of employees that happened to have good severance packages.

[0] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/blog/survey-of-recently-laid-of... [1] https://www.epi.org/blog/tech-and-outsourcing-companies-cont...

[curiousllama]

You’re not wrong, but this is also probably not the best time to point it out.

By analogy: the cost of achieving 0 deaths from automobile accidents is probably not worth it. Still, prob best not to mention it at the funerals.