Words Hurt (Unemployment Edition)

Olivia looked so sad. She barely wanted to get up, move around, or even eat. She was completely miserable. I asked my husband what happened. He caught Olivia running around the neighbor’s yard, and gave her a stern talking-to.

As I looked at how awful and sad Olivia was feeling, it hit me again: how on this green and watery earth can any human with decency, care, or empathy shit on, lie to, or gaslight people who are laid off, unemployed, or struggling?

Can we imagine the sadness, depression, shame, and other negative emotions that we are triggering?—?or adding to?—?in others when we carelessly or purposefully say mean things about them or their unemployment? What decent, caring, empathetic person would want to trigger or worsen these in others?

This means we need to become more aware of what we say or post… and clean up our act, as they say.

Side note: I go into these topics more in Chapter 3 of my Life After Tech book.

Empathy? Sympathy?

Let’s start with simple definitions of empathy and sympathy. Empathy is about seeing others’ realities through their eyes, without your point of view or preferences. Some would say empathy is feeling what that other person feels with them.

Sympathy is to feel?—?usually badly?—?for someone, even if you don’t see things through their eyes. “I’m sorry your cat died” is sympathy. You are sorry. But you might not really feel those feelings with that person, and you might not see it through their eyes.

If we had real empathy for others, we would understand their realities, and we certainly wouldn’t want to make things worse by talking shit. If we had real sympathy for others, we would care about their realities (even if we couldn’t identify with what they were going through), and we wouldn’t want to make things worse by talking shit.

“Being unemployed is your?fault.”

I thought about all the LinkedIn posts where people blamed the laid-off people for losing their jobs. You must not have been relevant. You didn’t embrace new technology enough. Your work wasn’t necessary. You didn’t do a good enough job providing your value.

One bad offender here was Jakob Nielsen, for commenting on one of my posts that (paraphrasing) everybody being laid off is a bottom performer, and companies are right to remove bottom performers. I blocked him after that.

The first prize winner for this awfulness has to be Intuit, for laying off over 1000 people and publicly declaring them “bottom performers.”

Anything or anyone blaming people for their own layoff?—?or a firing without cause?—?is mean. Inhumane. Not empathetic or sympathetic. Not friendly. Not meaningful, actionable, or helpful.

The list of (probably) incorrect reasons you got laid off or can’t find a job includes:

• You didn’t write enough/better cover letters.
• You didn’t make enough/better versions of your resume/CV.
• You didn’t pay money you don’t have to someone who will “improve” your resume/CV.
• You didn’t take so-and-so’s course on finding jobs.
• You didn’t network enough, whatever that means nowadays.
• You didn’t use AI enough.
• You used AI too much, and now the company thinks it can do your job.

These aren’t actionable.

When we hear these, we have no idea what to do. We don’t know what we did wrong. We don’t know how to get it right. We just have someone wagging their finger at us and telling us we’re a bad dog.

And it’s bullshit. Don’t absorb it and believe it’s true.

You weren’t “overhired.”

There’s enough evidence now to show that most of the people who were laid off weren’t overhired. We can see this evidence in things like:

• Laid-off people are nearly immediately replaced by lower-paid people. That job was important; the company just wanted someone cheaper.
• Laid-off people have included tenured veterans who sometimes were at a company for five or more years, sometimes over ten years.
• Even people who stayed at companies, got good performance reviews, and were promoted were laid off.
• Projects continued. Normally, you lay someone off because their job isn’t needed, and their work or project won’t continue. If the work or project continues, you needed people to do that work.
• Companies are usually very careful about hiring. They agonize over budgets. They consider strategies and promises. They don’t want to hire anybody they don’t really need. How did so many companies get this wrong and “overhire?” Well, they didn’t overhire. It’s a fake excuse in most cases.

Many laid-off people weren’t recent hires. It’s not like oops, we hired you three months ago, but oops we really don’t need you now. That did happen to some people, but that doesn’t seem to be the most common story in my LinkedIn feed. I mostly see people who are sorry to leave a place where they worked for quite some time.

Words hurt. Watch what you say to and around people who are in a bad?spot.

Some people are talking shit deliberately to make people hurt. They hope that if they cause fear or pain, you might want to buy their product or service. Unless they offer a no-questions-asked 100% money-back guarantee, you might not even bother considering their services.

It’s easy for those of us in a bad place to hear negativity and blame, and assume they must be true. The messages match some of our self-blame, so we take them on and add them to the pile.

Please resist that. Unfollow or block those people. You don’t need whatever they offer, especially if their offer comes with fear, pain, blame, or self-blame.

???? https://lat.link Life After Tech is a book, exercises, coaching, community, and more. You are the phoenix. It’s never too early to plan what you’ll do when you’re done with tech… or tech is done with you. Or you want to add non-tech work outside of a tech career.