Naturally my life is financially in order (no debt, no kids to support, no visa issues), so I recognize my privileged position, and I say this as a first generation US immigrant who went through many precarious visas including H1B. Envy was nonetheless the first emotion the article evoked in me.
I can tell you've never been laid off before, because even with severance it doesn't feel like a "long vacation".
Layoffs like this are heavily correlated with a collapsing job market. Finding a new job right now is orders of magnitude more difficult than finding a job a year ago. Getting laid off also works against you, as many potential hirers assume that laid off people were among the lowest performers of their company. It's not fair, but it happens.
It's also not really a relaxing vacation when you're busy prepping for interviews, dealing with interview calls and/or flights randomly scattered across the week, and other interview-related stresses. The clock is ticking and your full time job is now to interview to get a job. It's also likely (in this market anyway) that any company you interview with would prefer that you start ASAP, so you don't even have a defined end date.
Getting laid off with severance sounds fun until it happens and you're faced with the realities, especially in the middle of a collapsing hiring market that has been flooded with 100,000+ laid off FAANG engineers competing for every great job out there.
I've been laid off with no severance and it felt like vacation, so it might depends on your specific situation. It was my first job, in Germany, 70% of so of my salary guaranteed as unemployment benefits.
I didn't look for a job for like six months, I could have used the full 12 months as I was more than cash positive and still managed to save 40% of my income without changing my lifestyle, it took me two weeks to find a new one. That being said I'm not a "study for interview" kind of dude, life's too short to grind for that imho
Uhh, yeah obviously that felt like a vacation.
In my US state (Ohio), weekly benefits for those without dependents cap out at $530. That's about 19% of my current salary. It would be barely enough to cover my mortgage and utilities, but throw in the car (payment / gas / insurance), groceries, incidentals ... I'd be in trouble. (And unlike some of the forward-thinking individuals who've posted here, I don't have several years' worth of savings to rely on.)
Edit: and if, god forbid, I became disabled ... my government-provided benefits would be something like $150 a week. They may as well give me a kiss on the cheek for all the good that amount would do for me.
I was last laid off in 2015 by a large media company, we received only 1 month of severance. (Which was 1.5 months paychecks because they paid in arrears)
Severance and notice of small scale layoffs (company under 50) has no protection in most states. 8 person company offered no severance, but we had a pretty good sense it was coming a month away.
Taking the state to court for this while also trying to get a job would be difficult.
(for the record, I don't have any of these aside from the runway, since I have no significant debts due to the lack of a mortgage)
But the truth is that good jobs are going to be very competitive over the coming months. Many being laid off now are likely to end up accepting comp packages far below their previous comp. The doors are pretty much closed at the usual FAANG types
I can say anecdotally that I've already noticed an incredible easing of the difficulty in hiring (while maintaining a high bar)
Engineers are quite privleged. We make money hand over fist, more than enough that its pretty trivial to save up 6 months of expenses, and just quit, and do nothing for a couple months.
After all, there is no point in making money if you don't spend it, and one way of spending it is to just take a break from working for a little while. If a break is something you think would make you happy, you should do it.
And now to see loan forgiveness for people who took far fewer sacrifices (especially lawyers/doctors, who make significantly more than me now) - it sort of reinforces that working hard is a sucker move, and definitely discourages me from doing such paths if I believe I can just get a bail out later.
Do lawyers or doctors typically earn less than $125,000 or $250,000/household? If not, loan forgiveness does not impact them the way you think.
One of my friend groups has a lot of young doctors and recent med school grads. They are all looking for the best ways to take advantage of this, including things like accelerating marriage timelines to be a "household" instead of individual so they can qualify under the limit. Starting salaries for family practice physicians, for example, can fit under that $250K limit.
I'm not opposed to loan forgiveness for certain people, but the $250K household limit without a gradual phaseout is a baffling move.
I completely agree, some folks drastically benefit from this (in a needed way), and I feel no envy or upset towards them. It looks like my thoughts were misguided.
Fun fact: rural doctors actually make more than city/urban doctors usually.
[1] https://dailyyonder.com/pay-is-higher-for-rural-physicians-n... [2] https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/practices/primary-care-docs...
Just a note for anyone else reading this, but you’re only eligible for the $10k forgiveness if you have government undergraduate loans, and you make less than $125k. Few high paid professionals will qualify, and graduate law school/med school can cost $200k+.
TLDR: probably still work hard. Welfare is for the needy, or corporations.
The federal government designed the federal loan program to make them money, based on interest. It has panned out as a very stupid fucking idea, in retrospect, and has made millions of people debt slaves for years on end. They set themselves up for this, combined with stagnating wages, making everything a joke. Everybody wants to talk about bailouts and "work ethic" but seemingly forget the monetary policy was set and managed by the federal government over the past several decades. They could have done better policy if they didn't want a bunch of bullshit.
It has nothing to do with work ethic, at the end of the day. It was a policy decision from on high, and the snowball was set in motion probably long before you even went to school.
I can assure you that lawyers/doctors have FARRRRRR more than that.
I worked about 30 hrs/week while going to school. I didn't take a summer break. I finished my BS in CS in 2014 with about $45K of student loan debt that I paid off in 6 years.
For me to get upset now about people having some of their loans forgiven seems weird to me. It reeks of "I suffered, so should you!" energy. It'd be like fighting against new treatments for a disease because a loved one died from said disease already.
It is precisely because of how much that hampered me that I’m glad that others are relived of that burden. It’s even harder for kids these days!
If the money was clawed back from universities, that would be fine, since they were at the receiving end of the racket.
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/11/22/why-cant-the-do...
At the end of the day, this debt forgiveness is a drop in the bucket compared to other things that the government does that my tax dollars get spent on that I would prefer it not be. If we’re truly worried about the cost here, there’s plenty of other things we could take that money from that I would happily support.
Student loans are predatory. Some people fell for it and some people avoided it. I think the question: Who is (or should be) bailing any of this; rather than making you whole or keep this system just because you are the one who figured it out.
Of course, it is the tax payers (the weakest and most easily accessible $$ thing) who will pay for this (either with taxes, government debt or money go brrrrr). This will further alienate these tax payers and lead to the eventual collapse of this economic system.
So I guess I started off trying to make you feel better about it but now you are going to feel worse (since not only you won't be getting the special treatment but you are also probably the one paying both the predators and the "less intelligent" people who took these loans).