A layoff fundamentally changed how I perceive work

That's what happened during my first job almost 10 years ago. "we're different than other companies, we're family", "business is always personal", yadda yadda

Then one day out of nowhere "hey btw we're not going to renew your contract, we're nice so we give you an extra 10 days of vacation don't bother coming back tomorrow, oh and all your accesses have been revoked". At least I got the reality check right away, some people get that way down the line when their whole persona has already been built around their job

I think one has some deeper issues to tackle if one is basing their whole persona around their job. This is not a healthy thing to do, regardless of layoffs.

Someone should develop an LLM-therapist for this situation.

Difficult to avoid when there's lots of culture encouraging it, and especially once your hours are long enough that the rest of your life gets eroded.

I agree with the bad idea to put all your persona in a job.

At the same time One will have issues if his persona doesn’t really match with his (min)8h/day 5days/week activity.

At some point there is a kind of sunk cost fallacy entering the game ("I can't reinvent my ego/persona now, I'm 40 it's too late"), and maybe some form of addiction ("I love my job and I would be bored without it")

I know people who could easily retire or at least get a much chiller job but they stay in their high responsibility positions, complaining about it everyday, stressing them to the point of having physical consequences.

It happened to me, though I resigned when I hit burnout during covid. My whole identity was just being good at my job, and then I was no longer that. In part I think some blame is also to be placed on these companies who try to make the employees feel like a tribe or family. Since I've always been alone it was easy to slip into that false sense of belonging.

One thing that astonishes me, is that most people want to have a real team to be part of, contribute, give our best.. yet most jobs are just a game of lies and end up being the opposite (there are some good bosses but the stats are low). It's like two needs that can never meet.

It helps to find smallish but stable companies, making enough to be safe while not having crazy ambitions of 2x growth every xx months. It's much more relaxed, there is less office politics, churn rates are much lower, stress is non existent, &c. Usually they have older employees with families and a life outside of work.

The purpose of the system is what it does

> One will have issues if his persona doesn’t really match with his (min)8h/day 5days/week activity.

I really don’t think that this is true. Plenty of people work boring repetitive jobs such as assembly line workers. Pick up the pay check, commence actual living.

The dream is to work doing something that you love, but that’s not going to always pan out; and that’s ok.

We also start, or encourage starting work quite early on in our lives, and so it naturally grabs a place in people’s existence in their formative years as “a thing that they do”. Is it any surprise then, that it naturally ends up becoming at least a non-trivial part of people’s sense-of-self?

I dont get it, everyone wants to work for big tech or big corporations in general and then wonder why they do stuff like this.

Go to small companies, yes they pay less but also yes: you will have real impact and they actually need you.

At one extremum there's e.g. Brad Pitt, how could you tell him not to base his whole persona around its job ?

I can’t imagine how one would do this, period. No job has ever come anywhere near my persona.

The people who do so have always seemed utterly insane to me. It’s a business transaction like buying a loaf of bread. Why do people act like it’s like getting married?

I've been part of two really good teams, one went away because the company closed, the other because it was managed into smithereens. It honestly seemed like it didn't sit right with any level of management to have a bunch of at best average teams and then one very good team in the same org chart, they seemed to prefer to just have every team scrape along.

Little did he know that the therapist was one of the first AI that got invented, 40 years ago or so.

Eliza was developed in the mid-1960's, so that was more like 60 years ago, just for clarification.

Nah, small companies are burnout mills. Early in my career, I had explicitly worked on small companies and 4/4 times screwed over. Immediately when the big work is done and investments(or major profits) are in, suddenly the management starts replacing everyone with expensive consultants or their best chums from some failed business somewhere and starts strategic push out by stagnating.

While my experience can be rare/unique, at least at Medium/BigCo, my soul burning gets compensated, small ones are just “we are like family right?” and then push out once technical/financial growth starts rearing its head.

I’ve worked for the smallest startups (2 employees) to the biggest company (100k employees).

Everything can bring you burnout if the management is toxic. It’s independent on the size of the company. I’m now working for a small company that feels like a family even if they don’t say it.

> their whole persona has already been built around their job

Maybe this is one of the unspoken goals of bringing people back to the office.

Maybe society is submitted to a law of averages..

I'm sorry that happened to you. My own experience with burnout was pretty damning, but oddly, that happened with a career that was far more aligned with who I really am than my current career. There was a click, for me, that made me realize I cannot define myself by what I do for a paycheck and since then, my current career rarely comes up in IRL conversation, contrary to my HN history (which has more to do with my job being tech-related, so it fits in the context of HN comments).

But you touched on something that I struggled with for years; a sense of belonging. Humans are, by nature, fairly tribal. That's both a good and bad thing. However, we as individuals have to be mindful about how much we are acting on our sense of belonging. At the extreme end, when we let our desire to belong to something larger than ourselves call the shots, we tend to get radicalized or fall into religious zealotry. On a more day-to-day experience, our sense of belonging can drive us to seek external validation from people who simply will not offer it, which spawns things like discontent and resentment that cause more irrational behavior and damage your self-worth. It's a slippery slope.

What I have found is that being mindful about self-validation helps mitigate that. Reminding myself that I am good enough despite my flaws, I was not born to toil/be busy/make someone else rich, and my experiences and perspectives are valuable to me have become tools that help me make decisions about work/tasks that strategically avoid burnout. I never offer too much, and I know my limits very well, at this point. The result is most people see and respect that about me, where the ones that do not will quickly lose interest and move on to find someone they can successfully abuse.

You can't be aware of the toxicity when your parents, your teachers, your mentors, your bosses and your friends have all the same ethos (and actively put down any other opinion under slurs such as "socialism", "communism", "sloth", "failure of a human being", etc.)

The whole system of education is designed to channel this type of behavior from early childhood.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big proponent of high quality public education; it's a necessity. But the reason we have it is because businesses and corporations need workers.

You can: that's (part of) what fiction books are for.

Small companies can have their own problems. They may only somewhat overlap with the problems at big companies--although both need to make money at the end of the day. But they're far from a panacea.

This is the premise of the movie Sunset Boulevard, and of the much newer The Subtance. Tl;dr, it's not healthy for celebrities either.

Like The Fountainhead?

> Since I've always been alone it was easy to slip into that false sense of belonging.

Same thing happened to me. Work was the first place where I felt I actually belonged and knew my own worth. It can be very intoxicating.

Big companies can double your compensation though, it's a tradeoff.

Yes, but was it FDA approved?

Obedient workers.

if I assume that the system is a neutral emergent phenomenon, i'd say it values "skills" required by businesses because these are strong indicator of what ensures survival of the group (we might all study cosmology and get hawking IQ level in the end, if we don't know how to grow food, we're toast)

that said i'm curious if there are cities or groups who reduce the importance of material economy / business and promote real deep and beautiful learning

Do you now have more of a personality outside work?

I’m going through this now, just resigned due to burnout while being a “rockstar developer” with no life recently.

I also thought that small companies are better in that regard. But no, they often have their own toxic idiosyncrasies, like when a little power goes too much to the management’s heads. A small company that’s YOURS is better and actually needs you.

I think a fundamental reason is that some people build their identity around the only community they are a part of -- their job.

Like, book clubs, political parties, community centres, sport associations etc used to be the place for that. And work was also a place for that. My parent generation worked at like 3 different employees in their whole career.

Maybe its different in Europe due to workers rights? Never had bad experience in small companies but plenty in corps.

You have to work. If you really want to you can live on much less - rice and beans in a tiny apartment would let you live on a tiny income. However most people like luxuries in life. In addition, most jobs you cannot get anything done in an hour - it takes times to remember what I was doing the day before before I can write code again.

For the above reasons you will be working a significant number of hours. As such work will be a significant part of your existence. I would hope you are doing things you enjoy, and that in turn means it becomes a part of you.

The important thing though is make it an easy to replace part of you. Have other things you do. Hobbies, a family, sport, volunteer. There are lots of options. If something goes wrong in any of the above you have the rest to replace it. (family is the only one where you should strive to not have something go wrong - but even there it often does)

Assembly line workers invariably like assembling things. Even if they don't start liking it, they usually change their personas.

The one job I can think of where the people really don't like is telemarketing. But it's a rare exception, and people tend to not stay on it.

Most people who work those "boring" jobs have found ways to make it enjoyable. They still pick up their paycheck, but they have found some way to enjoy it. They talk the the person at the next station. They challenge themselves to how fast they can do thing (often the safety officer needs to stop them from getting better, which is itself a challenge)

Thanks for that, now I need a therapist for how old I'm feeling

> "socialism", "communism",

Both of them as Marx defined them are incompatible with other ideas and so deserve slurs. There are progressive ideologies with influence from Marx that do allow for other ideas to exist. There are many people who will throw away all of liberal philosophy for pure socialism. As soon as you allow for the liberal differences in outcome you have to agree for there won't be true socialism and you have to debate what (if any!) level of safety net you provide and further accept there should not be agreement. This isn't just that we won't agree, but the strong statement that an agreement would be a bad thing.

Peer pressure, if you were raised and lived life in such environment, its the default. Ie here in Geneva, Switzerland Calvinism originated. It promoted utter focus on work as a method of self-realization and achieving inner happiness by ie working hard consistently, finishing when work is done, not when its time to clock out and so on.

Of course it wasn't designed with modern soulless corporations in mind, but there were number of jobs in the past veering on bullshit, although not so common.

But yeah its a stupid approach in 2025. Find a passion. Not a hobby, not mowing lawn, or bbq, I mean passion that will make your heart pound and make you feel alive like you are a hormone-ladden teen. I have a few (hiking&camping in wild, climbing, via ferratas, alpinism, skiing, ski alpinism, diving etc), and then I juggle them based on what I can do. Then, corporate jobs with their wars and pressures will become just little broken kids playing zero sum games of who has bigger wiener, and can be safely and easily ignored.

We encourage starting work extremely late in advanced societies, due to the need to fit in education before then.

Those 'progressive ideologies' with influence from Marx are what make all of what we see today happen. From killing people if they cant pay for healthcare to these sociopathic layoffs 'because AI'. So 'influence from Marx' is just nonsense.

The simple reason why other ideas are not compatible with those two are because those 'other ideas' are geared for making this happen to maximize profit of the few. That's why they are incompatible and whenever you allow them this is what you end up with.

You can graduate from high school and leave your hometown, but the attitudes of high school remain in the office: the cliques, the cruelty, the in-groups and out-groups, the manipulation, the brown-nosing, the behind-the-back-shit-talking. The C students from your high school are now mid level managers above you and brought the mentality straight from there to the office.

I feel like therapy is common-sense pattern matching and using evocative metaphors. Ofcourse, in old days, one had to be well read to know these metaphors and life experiences of others, but through social media such knowledge and other's life experiences are on my fingertips. Very glad that I can tap into society's experiences library.

The Fountainhead has value in that it helps teach you that there are people who think like Ayn Rand. I wouldn't say it's particularly realistic, though: there are better books to learn about the world through. (But if you read more than two or three books, you'll quickly learn the problems with Ayn Rand's worldview.)

Books aren't mutable in the same way that arguments are: you can actually sit and dissect a book, in a way that you can't dissect a politician's rhetoric or a parent's scorn. So… kinda, yes: even The Fountainhead is worth reading, to some people (not that I'd recommend it).

Mine was before my career started in earnest as I took a job during one of the summer breaks in college, worked 10-11h a day with a commute of 3h in total on top of that without even having a contract on paper only for my employer to first suggest I work for minimum wage and then not pay me at all after the first month.

Naturally, I walked, but to this day I can't believe how naive/stupid I was back then.

Thank you for this unprompted demonstration that the mere mention of "communism" sends some into a ferocious - and vacuous - crusade.

Meanwhile bosses boss people around.

Systems built around profit seek efficiency, thus standardization.

I worked at mostly small companies and had one 3.5 year stint at BigTech.

“pay less” is an understatement. Top of band for most Big enterprise companies or smaller companies is about the same that a new college grad gets at BigTech.

While I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than go back to BigTech at 50, if I were young and unencumbered instead of a 50 year old empty nester, I would make the trade off in a heart beat

> we're family

My family doesn't give me performance reviews.

even without the notion of profit, averages reduce risks and helps survival imo

>The whole system of education is designed to channel this type of behavior from early childhood.

So what exactly are the parent doing all along?

(I think I know the answer - they are inexperienced/dysfunctional themselves)

True, one can build a society with no layoffs etc. but collectively we are just not smart enough to do it.

>One thing that astonishes me, is that most people want to have a real team to be part of, contribute, give our best..

What astonishes me is that people fall for that BS.

>I think one has some deeper issues to tackle if one is basing their whole persona around their job. This is not a healthy thing to do, regardless of layoffs.

True, I got to wonder if people who write these posts have any healthy relationships at all? Surely they would have had parents/relatives/friends etc. speak of layoffs?

Can add Atlas Shrugged and Nineteen Eighty-Four to the list.

> Meanwhile bosses boss people around

And with that you showed exactly why I have the knee jerk reaction to attack communism every time it is brought up. There is a constant play of this type of thing and people are starting to think that because it is unchallenged it might be right.

That is a completely false representation of what then other ideas really are about.

> (we might all study cosmology and get hawking IQ level in the end, if we don't know how to grow food, we're toast)

I first read that as "we might all study cosmetology ...", so my mind went to an altogether different space-based metaphor.

Why should one care how Marx defined "socialism"? The term predates him by many decades, so he doesn't get to say what is "true socialism" and what isn't.

"play" "this type of thing" "starting to think that"

Dude, that's the naked reality. You are contorting yourself to avoid facing it.

No that’s not it. Averages are easy to reason about top down. Averages are like manufactured parts; you can replace them when they break or slot them in where they’re needed. They’re easy to herd as a manager because they all work the same way. Before we had societies, this sort of reasoning wouldn’t have been very useful. A tribal chief doesn’t need uniformity, he needs to understand his members, all of whom he knows from birth, well enough to utilize their talents.