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Comment by tra3 | Hacker News Reader

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 a close family member: 63

Personal injury or illness: 53

Marriage: 50

Dismissal from work: 47

Marital reconciliation: 45

Retirement: 45

I recently went through a layoff, like probably quite a few in our industry lately, so it rings very true to me.

[0]: https://paindoctor.com/top-10-stressful-life-events-holmes-r...

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What’s my score according to my timeline of events - Late 2016- Layoff Early 2017- moved across country for new job Mid 2018- Got married Mid 2018- Layoff from second company Mid 2018-Mid 2019 - Moved away and back for two jobs Oct 2019 - Started new job Nov 2019 - Birth of child Dec 2019 - Death of father Mar 2020 - Cannot visit mother for 2 years due to Covid

I think my score is about 210-290 for the last 4-5 years . And I am supposed to keep a high performance because of health insurance and keeping my visa lol.

How are you feeling?

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.

> I feel like consulting a skill set different from being a developer.

Not really, "consultant" is just another word for contractor. Almost 20 years ago the company I worked for did a round of layoffs that did not affect me. But it got me thinking and I started looking around and decided to try contracting. It was just like being employed except the term was set (6 months) and the money was much better than being employed. That 6 month contract turned into 18 months and I did contracting for many years after. I don't regret it. It was the best money I ever made. But when you're doing hourly contracting it's hard to stop thinking about billable hours outside of work (especially if there's lots of work and no overtime cap.) "If I take a vacation I'm not billing for $X and I have to pay for the vacation, etc." Everything has its trade-offs. I'm employed now, but some days I think about getting back to contracting.

> Not really, "consultant" is just another word for contractor.

The difference between consultant and contractor in my neck of the woods, is that consultants have multiple clients where as a contractor is basically an employee-employer relationship, simply structured in a different way.

I believe the grandparent was specifically referring to an arrangement where you have more than one customer ("employer", if you will) to mitigate the risk of getting laid off.

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.

from [0]: Each event is assigned a “Life Change Unit” score. These are then added together over a year and used to predict your risk of illness.

So, it's a scale on a predictor of health impacts, vs say a measure of intensity.

Funny how retirement and dismissal from work are so similar.

Surely, this must be culture and country dependent. Given the safety net in the country where I live in, being fired is far from being as important as marriage.

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