It is well-known that if you're in the USA you can lose your job at any time, for no reason at all. At-will and all.

People need to plan for that happening, and not just assume it can't happen to them. This example employee should have thought "Hmmm, I should wait some years and save a good amount extra just in case".

I wish it weren't this way, but this is the reality of the world. Yes, it means moving slower and buying a house later (and for more money) - or never at all, but it isn't going to change and our hands are tied.

In the USA you can't out save the housing market unless your making 10x+ the median salary. A lesson I've repeatedly learned. I worked for a number of bootstrapped startups, and purchased houses far under what I could have borrowed based on my salary because I always wanted to have a good solid year+ of runway should I face an unexpected layoff during a downturn.

That has turned out to be some of the worst financial decisions I ever made. While my contemporaries were buying house for 4-5x+ their salary and over time those houses doubled, tripped in value, my house also doubled and tripped in value, but now the difference between the houses I could have purchased and the ones I did, are now in the millions of dollars (aka I have to find 2+ million to upgrade to a house only slightly better than the one I own). Meaning if I want to move up in the housing market to a house I could have purchased a couple years back for just a slightly higher percentage of my income is basically out of reach.

So a lot of people complain about what it takes to get their foot in the door, but the spread between houses has massively widened as well. Just 10 years ago 1.5 million would have gotten a house in the top couple percent, now that number is probably closer to 7-9 million. So even if your salary doubled or tripped, unless you purchased at the max of your previous salary its like starting all over in the housing market.

(and just to make this post longer, this is largely the result of interest free money, a few years back I realized that steady state interest one pays should always be just slightly higher than inflation. Anytime the inflation != interest rates happens it throws things out of wack. AKA while people are complaining about the current rates, if inflation is 8-9% the fed should have immediately reacted with 7-8% rates, which would have massively hammered the system, but apparently no one at us fed/etc has really studied control systems enough to understand that adjusting rates every couple months will never result in a stable system, especially if they fail to react to changes strongly. Their current strategy entirely assumes that inflation/etc slowly rises or falls.).

On the other hand, the people who bought in the aughts were caught underwater with the 2008 crash in home prices. When using leverage to make investments, the lever always works both ways.

I could easily have been a billionaire today if I'd made different moves (like buying all the MSFT or AMZN I could when they went public). I know a billionaire who did just that - he borrowed every penny he could and put it into MSFT at the IPO.

Of course, I was also urged to buy bitcoin when it was $500. I didn't. Shrug.

Where i live (Austin TX), I would have upgraded to a bigger house from my first if they had actually gone down in value. That was actually my plan and part of the reason I bought a cheap house in ~2005. But, the federal government stepped in too soon and made it clear to the banks that they were going to support the market. So outside of a few obviously overspeculated markets a lot of places just stopped going up in value, they never went down or if they did it was single digits.

I placed multiple offers on foreclosed houses (as did a few other people I know) none of us got them because the banks refused to sell them for less than the previous mortgage amount. They let houses sit vacant for 2-3 years until the market was basically recovered in ~2011. One of the ones I bid on, was listed for X, I bid that, was the only bidder and 6 months later the bank counter offered for X + 25%.

So, individuals got screwed on both sides, the people who lost their house, and the "savers" who were denied the deals they were waiting for.

(edit: Just to add to this, basically in auction terms the banks all set a hidden reserve price equal to the previous max while simultaneously listing them for far less than the reserve. It create an optical illusion of the housing market being cheap and full of unsold houses, while people who were actually underwater felt trapped because they would have to take a hit selling the house, and people trying to buy houses couldn't actually buy any without buying the "overpriced" ones being sold by actual individuals. A few people got lucky and bought at below market rates from individuals who had owned them long enough to be able to afford to sell at these lower prices, but those were pretty competitive even during the slowest part of the market. I was regularly outbid (I think it was something like 12 times), despite bidding over listing on them.)

"I was also urged to buy bitcoin when it was $500. I didn't."

I was doing a data science project for a class in 2013. Instructor wanted it implemented and internet visible, with encouragement for users to "vote with bitcoin". It was around $14-$15 at the time. I passed on doing the project...

But remember that for everyone whom you remember for doing the correct thing, there are probably dozens more who did the opposite, such as borrowing every penny they could to put into pets.com or some 'stable'coin. Success is generally hard unless luck intervenes.

Of course. I wasn't willing to take anywhere near the risk they were, and so I don't begrudge them their profits.

The federal reserve is screwed no matter what they do. Reduce interest rates? Lending increases so much the value of money is inflated away to nothing. Increase interest rates? The music stops playing, the borrowing stops, the economy grinds to a halt and enters a recession.

>Yes, it means moving slower and buying a house later (and for more money)

The latter is not necessarily true relative to other countries and showcases people don't understand the long term influence, or lack there off, of various contract structures.

The US has at-will employment dangling a sword of Damocles over your head 24/7. Well, here we have temporary contracts not getting extended to permanent, and the status of a 'permanent' contract being the only way to open doors, which employers will royally abuse to lower other benefits.

US or not, the premise remains the same. Don't be reliant on a party not looking out for your best interests.

The entire US is not at-will employment. And companies with strong employee unions do not have this issue of suddenly and without notice firing their staff...

Minus Montana, every state is at-will employment of some sort or another. And, I think Montana may even have it in some form now.

> And companies with strong employee unions do not have this issue of suddenly and without notice firing their staff...

Lots of people don't work at a place with a union, and don't have access to unionized employment due to industry, current geography, etc. Also we're seeing a huge anti-union push by a lot of interests right now, recently notable being Starbucks.

At will employment works both ways. You can quit at any moment to get a better job.

And yet, the norm is that employees give notice while companies give nothing.

As the WSJ reported a few weeks ago, companies often find out an employee had quit when the company noticed that they'd stopped showing up for work. Sometimes they disappear with accrued pay being owed them, and don't leave a way to contact them to give them their pay.

Companies doing layoffs often give 2 weeks notice in the form of a 2 week severance check and escorting them out. This is for good reason - very few people are productive as a short timer, and some are even destructive.

I'm not saying companies good employees bad. I'm saying these things cut both ways all the time.

I tendered my resignation once and was met at my desk in an hour. They brought two boxes, watched me pack. They interrupted me while writing detailed status for customers on each of about 5 projects I was working on. I hit the print button, and was escorted to the conference room. They offered a severance package if I agreed not to discuss why I was leaving. I handed the status package I'd printed to my (former) manager. He glanced at it, and recommended they double the severence. Best summer ever. I looked for work, and was paid to deliver sailboats offshore.

The reason people are met at their desk, watched, and escorted out is now and then an employee will be tempted to steal company equipment, and worse, commit some form of sabotage in their anger.

As usual, a stinker here and there ruins it for everyone.

Things only work both ways when they are symmetrical relationships. In almost all cases your employer is in a stronger position.

I've been an employer and an employee. It is symmetric. Employees can and do negotiate, and if you do something they don't like, they walk away. You cannot make them do anything.

If anything, it's the employee with more power.

Employees have special rights. For example, meeting payroll is the first priority of any employer. Any disruption on that and the state will hammer the employer into a pulp. Employees have all sorts of legal advantages in pressing frivolous lawsuits against employers. I've had lawyers from BigCorp tell me they just settle the frivolous ones, because it's far cheaper than going to court, especially with the court heavily biased against them. The suing employees know this, which is why they do it.

Employees can walk away at their whim. They can walk away if they don't like the cut of your jib, or because they don't want to work for a woman, or for any racist reason they feel like. An employer cannot.

Employee candidates can ask any question they like of the potential employer. Not so the other way.

Well if you are lucky enough to live in Montana instead of the other 49 states….

CEO: "Don't worry we are not planning any layoffs!"

me: "Why are we talking about layoffs at all? Probably should start planning for contingencies"

Don't get me wrong: There's almost certainly a more transparent way of doing this that doesn't involve straight up lying, and it's crummy as hell, but there's some amount of personal responsibility here in terms of knowing how to read between the lines.

It's a matter of perspective. We have a culture that largely puts business interests above independent peoples interests. If you agree with this then it makes complete sense that it's better for the company because that employee might have been kept and we want to keep them stable. If we warn them, they might become a flight risk and we might not need to cut them. Information asymmetry is our friend so let's give them only the information that's beneficial to us.

If on the other hand you take the perspective of supporting a bottom up independent worker interests above a business's (I fall in this category), then your point is quite valid. Information asymmetry here put me in a terrible situation, if you would have told me earlier, I might have made different decisions. That might not include leaving, but it might have included tidying up my resume and prepping for interviews, just-in-case. Maybe I follow through or maybe I just keep some backups lined up in case things go south. Some may just pass the risk back to the business and jump ship since they assume they have better odds doing this and may even get a promotion.

Personally I don't believe any business leadership's words, I skim financials, I watch movements in the laborforce especially around management, I look at markets and make my own interpretation. I assume they're providing intentional incomplete information to their advantage and try to infer reality from that combined with the other data sources. Businesses are not your friends and will lie to you to their advantage above all else. I'm not a subscriber to Hanlon's razor when it comes to self-interest. What can typically be attributed to self-interest should be considered above incompetence, especially when looking at something as strategic and methodical as a modern business structure that have countless meetings to sit around and discuss and analyze these sorts of things or contract specialized skilled services in these domains.

Why aren't you always keeping your resume tidy and staying ready to interview? In April 2020, when Covid hit, my company did an across the board paycut. The next week a recruiter reached out to me about a job that I really was T interested in. But we kept talking and she referred me to a job I was. I gave her my resume without any changes to it from before the pay cut announcement.

I spoke to the (internal) recruiter about my accomplishments based on a “career document” that was updated.

I did no special technical preparation for my interview loop (BigTech cloud consulting - app dev). I only practiced behavioral questions based on my career document.

>Why aren't you always keeping your resume tidy and staying ready to interview?

Keeping your resume tidy is more of an expression (making sure you have marketable skills), it doesn't take much effort to update experience and new or shifts in skilling.

As to interviews, I could go on about the current broken interview process, but suffice it to say that interview prepping takes several weeks of sitting through competitive programming problems for most people.

For those who presumably need no sort of prep time, good for you, I however need prep time. I also value my personal time and have no desire sitting around for an hour or more every day playing with competitive programming problems so you'll have fresh memory for interviews that use this silly approach. As such, like many people, I need a little bit of lead time before I can get through all the hurdles. I've yet to see a single employer who doesn't use this process in the past 4 years although maybe I have a bad sample. This includes big tech, mid and small tech and some big/mid that aren't even tech focused I spoke with at different points. I'm glad you managed to find a sane employer that considered prior experience, a resume, and traditional interview process. That is not the norm in my area to say the least.

So to add on, I’m older (48), when I looked at the landscape in 2017, my (step)son was graduating in 2020 and it was time for me to take a stab at BigTech.

I really had no interest in the shit show of the modern software engineering interviewing process since I had never had to do a coding interview in my life on the enterprise dev side.

I did know “cloud” by 2020 and had customer facing experience so I was able to pivot to app dev cloud consulting and my BigTech interview was mostly behavioral.

> Why aren't you always keeping your resume tidy and staying ready to interview?

because we have the rest of our lives to live

It’s really a once a quarter exercise.

- update career document

- update resume

- reach out to my network on LinkedIn and schedule a lunch with former coworkers

- sleep well at night.

I’ve been through a layoff, I’ve had to jump ship quickly (a company was acquired by private equity), and I had a sudden 10% paycut (2020). Guess how little I stressed?

Interview ready doesn’t mean “practice grinding leetCode”. It means always be in a position when opportunity knocks (or you need to find a door to knock on), you’re ready.

> It's a matter of perspective. We have a culture that largely puts business interests above independent peoples interests.

No. It's about the fact that it's literally the CEO's job to put the business's interests above those of any individual employee. Anything else wouldn't make sense.

Good luck with that attitude when your company depends on highly skilled labor that comes from a very small pool of talent (relative to all labor in the country). The game industry, and game engine programmers in general, are a small group and if a company isn't good to their employees they are going to have a very, very difficult time hiring and staying competitive. It's not like they can just grab bodies and throw them at projects. Even hiring the very best and brightest cloud engineers from a FAANG is going to see them flounder and waste time ramping up to game engine development.

Unless, as the game industry tends to be, every employer is awful, and you can get away with it because there is a lack of better offers for people to consider.

If one didn't have the attitude I mentioned the company will go under from employees leaving. You missed the point.

At no point in my life as an adult have I ever depended on my current job for my financial stability. I depended on having a marketable set of skills, a network and a savings account.

I definitely never went into buying a house without having 3 to six months worth of bills in the bank.

On the other hand, as a software developer for 25 years, it’s never taken me more than a month to go from “I’m looking for a job” to “having an offer”. I’ve changed jobs 8 times abs six between 2008.

Well to be honest, this last time took two months just because the hiring process takes longer at BigTech. But I wasn’t really looking. It just fell into my lap.

Speaking of which, even in todays world. Any software developer who worked at Unity shouldn’t have any trouble finding another job quickly. That’s intended to be a compliment.

> At no point in my life as an adult have I ever depended on my current job for my financial stability. I depended on having a marketable set of skills, a network and a savings account.

Congratulations on being one of the most privileged people in the country. You realize ~50% of the country doesn't even have enough money in their checking/savings to cover a $400 emergency expense right? https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/personal-finance/articles/49...

This isn't a "well just stop buying avocado toast, and start pulling yourself up by bootstraps!" problem. This is a systemic problem with wage stagnation and complete decimation of the middle class over the last decades. The fact is the average American can only dream of having privilege you mention like not depending on their current employment to pay next month's rent/mortgage.

We aren’t talking about “most people in the country”. We are talking about software engineers at a well known company that pays far above the median income.

Software engineers at Unity are not “suffering” making between $196K to $330K+

https://www.levels.fyi/company/Unity-Technologies/salaries/S...

My attitude was the same when I was making $33K as an operator/programmer in 1996 and when I bought my first house when I was making $70k in 2002.

Also, if you are living paycheck to paycheck with $400 in your account, you shouldn’t be buying a house. A house comes with maintenance and responsibilities that you’re not going to be able to pay for. The parent poster used the scenario of someone buying a house and then getting laid off.

"You realize ~50% of the country doesn't even have enough money in their checking/savings to cover a $400 emergency expense right?"

Great quote. Yet I see a lot of really nice cars humping down the highway. Teslas, Bimmers, Rivians, Ionics, etc. Er'ybody on their iPhone 13ProMax AND their AppleWatch. Spending like there's no tomorrow.

Like the man said about living within your means...

Saying that 50% of people live paycheck to paycheck is meaningless unless you are also implying that those same 50% are all excellent at managing their finances. Otherwise you are just saying that it is possible for people to spend every dollar they earn which is obviously true, but not interesting.

Is there a subset of that 50% who is living paycheck to paycheck despite having excellent financial discipline and trying to live within their means? Probably, but without knowing what percentage it is, the 50% (and I've recently heard 64%) doesn't tell you much of anything.

If an individual has chosen to be blissfully oblivious to

- basic economic news though mainstream news sources, which has been plentiful

- the overall financial health of their employer and the sector in which they operate, which usually make up a significant chunk of all-hands meetings, so there's no excuse for not having been exposed to it

- the health of their product/service and its value to their employer as a whole, which they should know simply by virtue of, y'know, doing their jobs

then frankly they're going to be blindsided by pretty much everything in their professional career, not just a mere layoff.

> It comes just weeks after Riccitiello told explicitly employees in an all-hands meeting that layoffs weren’t coming.

I wonder about the legality of doing all this...

Even if it did run afoul of labor regulations, it's damn near trivial for a business to find a justification ("new information", "changing market conditions", etc.) for a change of plans.

> Bank: "Congrats on your house purchase closing, your new monthly payment of $XXXX is due in two weeks!"

Actually 30-60 days depending on when you close. And candidly, that should be enough time to find a new job for a company with a reasonable hiring process.

This literally happened to me a few years ago. It was stressful but I was fine.

Is there any insurance that will cover a X amount of months if you get fired?

It’s called “living below your means and saving money”. No matter where you are in the US, as software engineers you are probably making well above the median income for your location. You should be able to save an emergency fund.

> It’s called "living below your means and saving money".

… or living well above your means in the time of asset bubbles left and right?

Let's say you and your buddy both make $125K.

If you bought a small $100K serious-fixer-upper house in order to live below your means in 2019 and your buddy bought a large $600K house at the same time which he could barely afford, then who would have "saved" more by mid-2021 when you both sold at 2X valuation?

At some point "living below your means and saving money" needs to turn into "you need to spend money to make money".

"Saving" does not protect you from inflation and it is of nearly zero value in the case of hyperinflation.

We don’t have to be hypothetical. We know an entry level developer at Unity makes almost $200K

I’ve done investment real estate before - I had three houses (including the one I lived in) with mortgages of over $500K when I was making $75K a year. Guess what happened when 2008 came?

How is that person who didn’t save, got laid off and having a $600K mortgage going to fair?

Fast forward to 2022. I have a house in the burbs of a major metropolitan area that at the time I had it built was less than 2x our household income (2016) and I had savings. Since we were living below our means, when I had a 10% (Covid related) pay cut, it stung, but I shrugged and kept it moving.

Saving money is not a defense against inflation. It’s meant as a safety net so when the stock market crashes and you lose your job it’s just a minor inconvenience instead of a major life event.

Nope, although if you got disabled (perhaps from an accident at work) and were laid off as a result a short term disability insurance would help.