What not to say to someone who has just been laid off

Writing a recommendation on LinkedIn, to me, seems like the most actionable thing one can do in such cases.

It was unexpected, related to something I had posted about trying to fix our riding lawnmower, and honestly took a huge chore off of our plate at a time when we needed to focus on family.

I've appreciated so many things people have done for us, from just a message, card, shoulder to cry on, or visiting at the hospital or attending a funeral. But I was taken aback at how important and meaningful that concrete and thoughtful help was. I'm now trying to look for ways I can offer something concrete and thoughful whenever possible.

And for friends, I'm also open to meals, walks, hugs, co-working for a couple hours in a coffee shop, whatever they would find helpful emotionally.

We made plans instead to meet up for coffee and catch up next week. I wish I had something more concrete to help him out. This feels only slightly better than the empty platitudes mentioned in the article.

- weekly check-in to see how their job search goes and even if they need a laptop to do their home tests (because i knew it was broken)

- my reference and recommendation when they would reach the final stage of any interview ( i got a call from a hiring manager where i told them that they were basically the most talented colleague i ever had and it should be an instant hire)

- i even asked a friend to create a job for them in his company -when the previous one got into hiring freeze- and hire them temporarily until they found something more suitable.

I believe i did almost anything beyond human possible for them.

"Let me know if there's anything I can do" isn't all that helpful without being specific.

I guess posting that screenshot wouldn't be the best move...

"Who's there?"

"Not you anymore."

This is dreadful, I know.

This isn't a cultural thing. Human evolution is ugly. Evolution's filter function is death. If you can't feed yourself, nature will use you for food.

You are coming from a place of extreme privilege lamenting that people get stressed about losing a job. It's not a minor inconvenience if you're working on something you think is important. Button pushers have little to mourn. People working on big projects have to establish new goals for themselves & align themselves with an entirely new professional network. These are not minor things.

Good for the species, I guess. Aggravating for the individual. :)

Personally I vacillate between fear of the future and optimism of the future. Peers expressing the opinion that there's nothing to feel bad about helps my perspective a lot more than people acting like they think someone just died when I suffer a setback.

His entire family is on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. I'm 3 states removed, so I can't physically help him with anything, either. My own employer is not hiring right now. The best that I can do is reach out to my own network on his behalf, and I am doing that, but I do not like the feeling of helplessness that I feel over his situation, let alone what he must be feeling about it. It really does feel awful, even as a bystander.

It highly depends on the context. Are they 20-something single person working on a high-pay job, or someone older with a family to support and struggling? The response needs to be different.

"Hey, I heard about the news. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help, big or small."

Or for someone I'm close to:

"Heard you got laid off. That fucking sucks. How are you holding up?"

I started looking for other work the same day.

I have never heard of this, and google doesn't return anything useful... what does this refer to?

In the summer of 2008 I had just got back from an internship at Microsoft when the impacts of FC started to land. Microsoft was generous to extend me an offer (to start in 2009 fall), and as I just started negotiating my recruiter reached out to me to let me know that I have 24 hours to accept the offer due to 18,000 employees (~18% of workforce) being let go.

It was a mind numbing number. These were people and families that we knew and had an amazing summer with. I personally knew interns who had declined offers to try and negotiate a different offer who did not have anything to show for all the hard work put in.

I came back to campus a few week later to complete chaos. Harvard Business School, at that time, was a feeder school to Finance and Consulting. I had so many friends whose internships were yanked from under them. In some cases bankrupt banks came after part of the tuition payments that they had made on behalf of their former (now students) employees. Over the next few months we saw families and lives disrupted, mortgages, visas and plans thrown into disarray.

I felt thankful to have a job then. And I feel thankful to have a job today.

My hope for Meta emerging from these deep, needed cuts is that (a) we telegraph clearly that we are done with cuts for now and we give teams the psychological safety to work and create impact (b) we take the moment to reevaluate who we are as a company and how we evolve systems to value what we need in our employees to accomplish what we need going forward.

To Meta employees who have been laid off today. My network is your network. Please ping me here. I am deeply networked in the Seattle community and am happy to make introductions for you. In addition to that I am happy to make time to do resume reviews and/or interview coaching and feedback

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/health-history/its-time-le...

That said, it at least provides a vocabulary for talking about loss.

From the authors reference frame the patients appeared to linearly accept their fate. If we randomly time traveled to their room and interviewed them which state would we encounter? Is the progress static regardless of environmental inputs or variable?

I have a hard time trusting past truth these days; editors and publishers want to sell books. There’s a huge labor market dedicated to PR and optics, tailored messaging. Sensibilities of the past were much more accepting that whatever made it on store shelves was absolutely correct and not a tailored product placement.

If you have a family that relies on your income it can be very stressful. Especially if you don’t have a fund. Uncertainty breeds anxiety.

While the juxtaposition seemed off to me as well, layoffs can have serious consequences. Not everyone (in all situations) can send a few emails and have another well-paying job in a few weeks. I've known especially somewhat later career people in the dot-bomb era who basically never really recovered from a layoff in terms of either career or finances. So, yes, it's just a job with the caveat that you probably want/need to get another comparable one and probably would prefer not to move across the country or even move countries (depending on visas) to do so.

"It's just a job" is a nice idea, but since it's something I do 8 hours a day 5 days a week I try to make it something I enjoy. I enjoy meeting with my coworkers each day, and like the projects I'm doing. I also probably care the least about my job of most of the people I know. For some of my FAANG friends working at a FAANG has been a life long dream. Sure it's easy to say "work shouldn't be important!" but for some people it is.

Most obvious financial insecurity: The tech market is shrinking (I personally think it is collapsing, but that is not a necessary belief to feel grief). Many of the people being laid off right now (and in the future) will have much stiffer competition than before. I have a recently laid off friend who just had a baby. His partner doesn't have a high income job. That's a lot of added stress. To add to this most FAANG employees might not see nearly as high comp as they're used to.

Then there is the serious loss we're going to see with any of our friends that are foreign nationals. I have a few friends on H1B visas. They're a big part of my life, own a home and plan on staying in the US indefinitely. They assumed they were on the path to a green card, which is reasonable given the market when the arrived at the US. It's very possible they will be forced to go back to their home country, never to come to the US again. Not only do these people have a justified reason to grieve, but any of their friends do as well.

And big picture: we're potentially seeing a change in the entire industry, on par with the dotcom bust (maybe worse, maybe better). I'm guessing you're too young to remember but for many people getting laid off in 1999-2000 was the end of their tech career. To get a sense of how big of an impact this has, consider how many of your coworkers are from the dotcom era? I'm guessing not many. The tech industry was huge and exciting then, just like it has been recently. A lot of people got wiped out and never returned to the high times of the late dotcom period.

There's honestly a lot of grief to be felt right now, not just for those being laid off but for those impacted by it indirectly (plus I think we're all waiting for that meeting if we haven't already had it).

So it would be a completely novel experience for me.

When I was reading through the article however, I got it. Because while I haven't lost a parent yet or lost my job, I have lost a wife. One day I got a call around 5pm Friday that she was a state away and leaving me. Like out of the blue. No idea.

And people kept trying to tell me how I felt. And none of them were right. They offered vague promises of help, but there was nothing concrete. But I knew what I needed to do and just went about the business. The worst thing, the most annoying thing, was people trying to treat you differently and tell you how you feel and ascribe your every thought, word, and action to the event. If you had a rough morning because you spilled coffee on yourself, well it's the event. If you decide to go out to a bar and see people you haven't in a while, well it's the event. Feeling bored at work, the event. Happy, the event. Sad, the event. Upset because everyone is saying everything is about the event, well it's really because of the event.

I can say in my case, I did just want to get on with things. But it's almost like I wasn't allowed to.

And I think that's what the article is trying to convey. Let people handle their internal state the way they want to.

As somebody who's been laid off and fired before, I think the hardest part is not always the money (though it can be), but loss of control.

People say the same thing about having their house broken into, they don't care about material loss, it's the sense of violation and not being safe in their homes that may persist for years that far outweighs money.

So the hard part can be, especially the first time when you don't expect it at all, suddenly having the routine of your daily life ripped away. All the projects, the mentoring, the presentations you were planning, all the coworkers you talked to daily, all gone in a snap.

If you're taken by surprise (which can happen a lot actually, since a lot of people in tech are incredibly awful at giving negative feedback directly and clearly) then you may for years get uncomfortable about any Friday meeting on your calendar from a manager. Or you may have trouble making yourself work at all when a pending layoff is announced.

But in a way it makes you stronger, more able to separate your identity and self-worth from your work.

For many on HN you might be right, but for people living paycheck to paycheck it causes an enormous amount of stress. My dad was a factory worker and got laid off when I was young. It was hard. I was old enough to understand the real stress my parents were under while they tried to pay the bills each month (it's fun having your water turned off which can take 48h to turn back on after you pay smh). Luckily my grandparents helped financially while my dad worked 3 jobs to make ends meet. I was working and gave them the little money I had.

Often though, the decision on who to lay off also considers who might be close to retirement, who might cost more to make redundant (redundancy pay in many places is based on years of service and there might also be long service leave owed), and the mixture of skills and knowledge the company thinks it will need going forward.

Also some people will have built up strong relationships with colleagues, teams and clients through their work. Their potential to continue these relationships typically drops dramatically without it being a regular part of work. That can make some people quite sad personally and frustrated that all of the work developing those relationships will suddenly not be very useful anymore.

Or maybe "use the time off to set up a Kubernetes cluster"