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Comment by shortstuffsushi | Hacker News Reader

Calling it a "predictable eventuality" implies the victim is at fault for not preparing. I have a number of friends (of course, not software devs) who are aware that their company may at any point dump them (one company goes even so far as to say regularly "everyone is replaceable," and I have not been able to talk said friend out of leaving...). Due to a variety of reasons / excuses, they can't or won't leave these companies, and are not financially well off, so when it does come, they're going to be SOL. It's not un-preparedness, it's inability to get ahead of it. Yes, some of them could be making better fiscal decisions, but others are trapped by kids, medical conditions.. etc.

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I really am blaming the "victim" of a layoff of an upper class engineering job if they suffer the consequences of setting up their lives as though they will always be employed without gaps.

It is not a lot to ask for someone in the top x% of earners to set aside a few months' expenses instead of spending every dollar on housing/food/entertainment/etc.

There are situations where employers do mistreat employees, but failing to guarantee perpetual employment is not one of them.

It depends. I got laid off during the dot bomb (contract not renewed) and I had 4 months of money saved up. I was out of work for 6 and had to move to a new city. The dot bomb + 9/11 was pretty devastating for the area I had worked in. I had only been in the biz for a few years and didn't make that much as a tech person. It was also a techie college town, so there was lots of labor supply.

I got laid off again about 3 years ago. It was nice. I got an immediate offer from someone I had worked with before. I wished I could have taken more time off. I currently have several years of expenses available to me.

It really depends on where you are in your career. Money really is freedom in the US, try not to spend it carelessly.

People treat being laid off like they treat death - it's something they intellectually know can happen, and does happen to others, but they're always entirely surprised when it happens to them.

Many people (myself included!) have a hard time saving against potential outcomes and find it convenient to explain away why I don't (as I spend money on non-necessities).

I've been laid off six times. It was a surprise once, the first time, an early job at Wal-mart. The other five times I could see it coming (and three of those times I had already started actively interviewing elsewhere). Three of those jobs were small businesses in the video game industry, where layoffs after a game is finished and released are pretty common.

I was actually more surprised that I somehow didn't get laid off at a previous corporation that had multiple rounds of deep layoffs, especially considering how often I had been laid off in the past.

In fact I found out when the department head put in his notice that I was on the list of one of those layoffs, but so many people quit in the meantime that they didn't need to lay off as many people, so he was able to take me off the list. I stayed there a little too long, through inertia and also I had so many 1 to 1.5 year job "hops" from all those previous layoffs I felt I should stick around a bit longer to show I am able to stick with a company when they let me.

It would have been a blessing if they had laid me off, though, it would have forced me to find a much better job much earlier.

This strikes at the heart of the matter - you want the 6 mo or 1 yr "nest egg" so you don't have to wait for the company to tell you it's time to move on - you can jump ship earlier once you start noticing the signs.

Few do, however.

Definitely, and I don't mean it to sound like these people couldn't be making better choices, but once you've dug your hole deep enough, it's hard to ever get to a point where you can be "safe" from this sort of thing. Even if they knew, for example, that the company was shutting down for a month starting in six months, the likelihood of being able to stow away ~ two paychecks during that window is quite small.

>but they're always entirely surprised when it happens to them.

Not always. When I was laid off I wasn't surprised in the slightest. There had already been layoffs and the company eventually effectively shut down.

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