Just looking for advice, I just got laid off of my job o two years. Before that I had a series of jobs with the same companies for about ten years. I feel like a failure and am just wondering how other people process something like this.
Companies’ decisions to hire and fire people are not personal, they’re just business. They need X number of workers for a set of tasks, they hire them. They no longer need that many, they fire them. It’s a purely economic decision. Talent and experience are not even much of a factor.
Don’t blame yourself. Don’t take it as a measure of personal worth. We’re all kind of at the mercy of the market for our labor.
I can say that drinking about it definitely doesn’t help
I got sober almost 7 months ago, I don’t have any desire to throw that away, I hope you’re doing well :)
Well first you apply for unemployment benefits. Then, enjoy a day or two of freedom. Let loose, fuck it all.
Then you make a plan. Did you get any severance payout? Do you have an emergency savings fund? How long will it last you? Form a budget and a timeline. What is your backup plan if that time runs out? Can gig work fill the gap or extend that line?
Then you apply for jobs like your life depends on it. Leverage your professional connections you’ve made along the way.
These are all rhetorical questions for yourself to figure out the next steps. But eventually it will end, and you’ll be an employed drone again.
Layoffs happen. Don’t take it personally, because it will be no help now anyway. What’s important is the future and getting a new job.
Take some time, be with friends, and realize that it’s probably not your fault. You have just been taught a valuable lesson about the relationship between employers and employees: They only care about the value you can provide to the company and will cut you loose the minute you cost more than you provide.
You should view them the same way. You trade them your time and knowledge for value (money and benefits). If you can get more value for your time and knowledge, lay them off and go with a higher value employer.This is good advice. I was laid off and took it really hard. A few years later, I ran into a coworker from the same place and learned that we were all laid off and I was just the first so I assumed I was the only one. Two years later, they contacted me to see if I was interested in “coming back” after the company had a failed outsourcing effort. No thank you.
The toughest part is facing the first few interviews. Be prepared to speak to the event. Be honest but kind to yourself. Tell how you learned or grew from it. Don’t dwell on it, either. It will be hard, but gets easier with time and practice.
It’s okay to feel bad or angry, but don’t blame yourself. Being laid off is a violent act, a theft. They stole from you. Over twelve years, your work provided value to this company. This value flowed into constant capital (buildings, machines, laptops, tools, whatever is needed for that work). All this stuff is still there. If it gets sold, you won’t see any of it. You got paid less then you were worth to your employer, otherwise, why hire anyone? The unpaid part of your work (your surplus value) payed for all this constant capital. You didn’t control it, but at least you could use part of it in your job. Now by firing you, they made the theft complete.
The market always has ups and downs, on up times, you didn’t get any fat bonus. On down times you just get let go. For a capitalist, firing people is a natural and expected part of exploiting them. Accept that with all the chaos of the market and the periodic crisis of capitalism, being let go can happen to anyone.
The antidote to feeling bad about it is doing something about it. Join a Marxist org, read theory, join a union.
One of my two life mottos:
- How hard can it be?!
- Oh well, it is what is it.
it gets easier after the 5th or 6th time :p
This is the truth, the trauma hits so hard the first time.
it hits hard the other times too – it’s just that you’re VERY SLIGHTLY less scared because you have an idea of what to expect and what to do.
Think of businesses like a lawnmower. It’ll cut your feet as happily as it cuts grass.
Wear protective shoes and never trust it.
Therapist. Why has nobody suggested getting a therapist? Go to therapy.
Therapy will always be a good answer, but given they are laid off, often times therapy is a luxury
Yeah that’s true. Therapy always seems to end up a fucking luxury. I hate it.
Remember, if you got fired, you might have fucked up or failed (might, still not guaranteed). If you got laid off, then your boss’ boss or C Suite fucked up. They made bad decisions and the business revenue didn’t show up as they predicted, and you’re just paying the price instead of them. So try not to sweat it, and recognize that unlike the 70s, a lot of companies now plan to grow aggressively and layoff at the first sign of danger.
Hopefully you got a severance large enough to give you a bit of breathing room while you look for another job without too much stress
I can’t tell the difference, they called it a corporate restructuring in the meeting and the document says they are “permanently eliminating” my position.
Realistically I think it’s because I filed an HR report against my manager because after months of being unfathomably difficult she started laughing at me in my 1 on 1 because she didn’t beleive that two other directors told me to do something she disagreed with.
You’d consider that being fired right?
the document says they are “permanently eliminating” my position.
That sounds more like you were made redundant than laid off
What’s the difference and is that better or worse? Lol
I’d say it’s better. I don’t know the actual difference but I always thought about it as redundancy is your employer saying that they don’t need people doing your job anymore, or they don’t need as many people doing it. In other words, it’s the role itself that’s being eliminated.
Being laid off sounds to me like you’re fired but for no real reason, but they don’t want to call it a firing. Like in an at will state in the US. It’s not a thing where I am though, if they want to fire you they need a good reason and there’s a process to follow.
That’s just what I think though, so might not be accurate
It should be pretty clear on the paperwork. If you were offered severance and/or are eligible for unemployment benefits then you were laid off.
I mean yeah I got severance and benefits
It took me a while, but I eventually realized that I’m not defined by my job, and I have such a rich fulfilling life outside of it, or I at least have the opportunity to build one. Once I stopped defining myself through my job, I was a lot happier and more motivated to just find another job and not worry about whether it’s something that a stranger would find impressive, since I’d be talking to them about other aspects of my life now anyway.
So much this. Once you can detach yourself from your ideal vision of external perception and make your self worth determined by you, yourself and not your work it makes life so much easier.
Talking about your skill sets in a different frame can help. So can exploring things outside of work. Life is so much more than work, regardless of what the machine would have you think.
Lawyer up.
Quit facebook.
Hit the gym.
But honestly, this is good advice. Consult a lawyer about your layoff to ensure you were given appropriate entitlements and severenace. Apply for EI and make sure your bills and responsibilities are being paid for.
Don’t jump to social media and declare “I’m open to work”, because that will bring the sharks. Reach out to your network instead, and see if anyone has something you’d be a good fit for, and would be excited to pursue.
And keep yourself a good routine. Get a daily workout, or walk or something in, to keep sane.
You got this. You are not your job. Your next job will come along.
Got laid off. Took them to court for unlawful firing. Won a settlement.
Feelings-wise, I never felt like failure, because all my hate is for the capitalistic system that produces such outcomes. Almost everyone goes through this at least at one point in their lives. While sometimes being fired is of course an individuals fault, it being a traumatic event is society’s fault.
In general though, this seems like a question that is completely independent of the circumstances. You simply should never feel like “a failure” because while everyone makes mistakes, no person is ever entirely wrong or a failure. The reason people feel “like a failure” anyway is because of this constant pressure placed on everyone to “succeed” and “achieve” and whatnot. From friends, family, the media, and so on.
There is no easy way to shed this pressure, but it is possible. First you must truly understand the mechanisms at play in all of this, what state you would like to be in, and then it’s a lot of practice to remind yourself of these concepts again and again and again.
How did you prove unlawful firing?
It’s basically by default in Germany if the worker did nothing malicious. So the burden of proof was on them to prove I did something malicious, which they could not.
It’s one of the cheapest ways to get rid of an employee you don’t like. Cheaper would have been to pay me off from the start, but they gambled that I wouldn’t fight them, and they lost.
I just move on and look for other job.
I went on a road trip to Vancouver Island and found a new job there and the layoff ended up being the best thing to ever happen to me
I got laid off when I was 27 and planning a wedding as the primary earner. I was fortunate enough to have savings to get us through till my next job, but that took about 6 months. Its scary, but my advice would be to focus on yourself for a few weeks if you have the financial means to. I dont mean spend a lot of money or go on vacation, but maybe get started on your job profiles and resumes and apply here and there, but also just take time to process and grieve. Go for a walk or a drive and see the world during the day. Play some games or something or work on that fun project you never had time to before.
For me, it was around the time Tears of the Kingdom came out, and zelda is one of my favorite franchises. I would wake up play some Zelda, apply for jobs online for an bour or two, play some Zelda, make dinner for my wife and hang out until she went to bed, then play some Zelda some more.
There’s no “correct” amount of time to be out of a job. I’ve seen people get hired within weeks, but I’ve also seen people go for mo tha or even years. It’s all a process, but like other people said, your job does not define you and you did nothing wrong.
