Well said. I've been laid off a couple of times in the last 5 years. It sucked when I was notified of it. But thinking back, all of us here on HN are incredibly privileged. We get laid off with months of severance and basically get another well paying job nearly immediately.
Be careful with any use of "all"—there are large numbers of us who have never seen Silicon Valley, many who live in countries with poor standards of living, and even a number who don't work in tech at all. All of these people are also contributing to these conversations, and it would cause a lot of misunderstanding to assume they're all ex-FAANG.
This. I am always a bit shocked by the Valley bias to believe you can walk out of a building complex and get a job down the road. Even in the rest of the US it is nowhere that easy, and being in Europe (where many high profile tech companies hire copious amounts of people who can do the same-or better-work than their US counterparts but where the job market is fundamentally different), I sometimes find that worldview borderline insulting.
I can only imagine what other countries might be like--I would expect ageism, local laws, market maturity, and even factors like origin and upbringing to still be significant risk factors if people were to be laid off in the casual manner the US seems to take for granted.
I am not in the Valley, but I am in a large US metro. So yes, good point.
But the context of this article is a person getting let go from Google, not from a job digging ditches. From that point of view, yes, I think there is definitely privilege, compared to places elsewhere that you mentioned.
> all of us here on HN are incredibly privileged. We get laid off with months of severance and basically get another well paying job nearly immediately.
At age 39, I think I've had a traditional salaried job for about 6 months of my life so far and that was around age 23. It didn't suit me and I've always loooked for alternative forms of making money since. I've had a great run as a freelancer for the last twelve years or so. For the last few years in tech, and before that as a performer and dancer.
It's important when you're part of an online community not to generalize the other people there. I am not like you, you are not like me. We come from different countries, have different backgrounds and outlooks on life.
The thing bringing us together is a shared interest in the topic of this forum. Don't expand on that and assume it means we have similarities in other areas, that's groupthink territory. It's our differences that make this place interesting.
I am here reading comments from my poor country only having had a job for one and a half years in the last 8 years. Not complaining but i believe there is a diversity of people visiting HackerNews - different backgrounds, culture, locations, circumstances, etc.
