People spend 8 hours + lunch and commuting every weekday on their job. It's almost 50% of the time you spend conscious during a week. Most people want more out of that than just a chore that needs to be done.

Also: unless you're genuinely curing cancer or flying food to starving African villages or something, 95% of software companies are pretty damn useless and any impact a SWE imagines is basically just a mental fantasy that helps one keep working. No one is genuinely happier because another API is created or some rich person has a better way of managing which products he's selling to other rich people. It's all basically useless and just a way to make money.

It might be that a dev that has a money cushion and is willing and able to relocate can compete on a level others can't because competition would only be localized.

OP was unemployed a year. Time adds up, that's a lot of money.

Luckily my government gives me a full year of unemployment benefits at 2/3rds of my salary besides my savings. Obviously, I don't wish to test my luck regardless, but not everywhere is as cutthroat as the US.

The alternative is to use the money the government doesn't take and save it for your future "unemployment benefit".

If I choose to refresh myself via mid-day beer, so what? The code doesn't care how long I sit inside an office. It cares how well my brain works.

(..yes, too much beer and it won't work anymore. Everything in moderation.)

The whole "layoffs happen because employees are lazy, and affect lazy employees" is a nice narrative of your a business owner to keep the rank and file "motivated", but it's rarely an accurate portrayal of the situation.

I love what I do, but I've found that even still if I let that fact convince me to work more than what is required of me I will eventually feel burnt out and eventually depressed. Maybe this isn't the case for everyone, but it's life outside of work that brings true meaning and purpose to my life. Time with friends and loved ones, going outside into nature and having new experiences, these are all things that make me actually happy. Loving my work just means I'm not sad when I'm at work.

Any specific thread that might be particularly enlightening/interesting?

Also, having a job gives you a basic social identity to use to interact with people, and positive cash flow lets you be expansive and outgoing. It's very easy to take this for granted, or assume focusing on work is ultra-materialist, if you don't have a lot of experience going without. I agree that it's healthy to not worry so much about the day-to-day minutiae of a specific job, but this is a lot different from the inevitable decline that comes with not having any job at all.

Just because this is a norm doesn't make it healthy. When your identity is rooted in something that can easily go away, it makes for a weak foundation. Lot of examples of jobs that are relatively short-lived (athletes, military, etc.) can show how difficult transitioning is when your identity is tied to your job.

I think it's unhealthy to have your identity tied to your specific employer, job title and tasks that you do for them. You as a person should not be defined by the tickets in your current sprint.

However not having a profession or any job is much different and worse. Unless you're older and retired, or independently wealthy, then it means you're going to cut back on everything. You won't socialize with other people society deems successful, you won't date, you won't grow a family, you won't travel or do anything other than continue to exist. All parts of your situation will shrink and decline. You are running out the clock toward total destitution.

I'm making this point because it's easy for people who are having a successful career to say, oh, of course I'm not my job, while missing entirely that they see themselves as a person who has a good job and will likely get another good job if their current job ends. They don't mean that they see themselves equally as a software developer or a dishwasher or on the street and it's all the same to them, so sharing the perspective that you are not your job in a discussion about extended unemployment is maybe not very appropriate.

Whether this latter reality is healthy or not, I don't know, but people have identified themselves as successful based on their trade or other social categorization for thousands of years, so at least we can say it's not new.

Will Storr writes about this much better than I can explain it here. But his point is essentially that the healthiest approach is to have your identity tied to many disparate parts of your life so that if one falters, the way you view your status doesn't hinge on that one failure. Just like you stated that "people identified themselves as successful", is a measure of status. If your esteem/status is based on that one domain, you're putting yourself at greater risk. It doesn't matter if a buggy-whip maker was the best tradesman around, he's status is still at risk when cars become popular.

The other part is that I believe research shows it's typically unhealthy to have one's social circle centered around work because those aren't very tight bonds. Again, it's a point to spread your social circle across shared interests and values rather than a job.

In most cases switching from one tech job to another will keep you in the same middle-to-upper-middle class even if you have to take a relatively large pay cut. You can even lose your job without something else lined up and it's not a big problem as long as you're confident you'll find something similar soon.

All of that is at risk with extended unemployment or being forced to indefinitely work for lower pay in a different field. Consider all the life changes someone might have to make if they have to change from being a software developer making $150k to being a rideshare driver making $40k, after six months, a year, or five years. I don't know about buggy-whip makers but probably they'd be okay with losing their jobs if they were guaranteed equal work in the new car factories. What they really dreaded was having to work for less pay in the new factories, or becoming day laborers or similar. This is what motivated the original Luddites.

We probably do disagree on the buggy-whip/factory point. Being a craftsman carries more status than being a cog in a factory. The reason why Henry Ford made $5/day a thing was workers were leaving in droves because the work was miserable and monotonous. High pay compensated for miserable work and lower status. I've known people who go from being "somebody" in a particular field (like the military) to being a "nobody" in a different field (like a factory). Even though they got paid better in the latter, they yearned for the former because of the lost status.

What your replies seem to confirm is how much we as a society base our identities on work, sometimes to the exclusion of so much else.

This can be more difficult when you have been part of transforming a company for 20 years instead of job-hopping every few years. When you have advocated for changes and they have been implemented, there are parts of "you" in the company.

Also the CV looks very empty in this case, even when having implemented many interesting things.

You took 37% paycut and you’re happy with it? Why?

OP took a job that would provide an income that happened to be 37% less than the one OP had before.

He did take a pay cut. 37% can be felt by anyone earning an income. It's often the decider if you have money left over after living expenses or not.

Let's say you earn 200K. 100k goes away for taxes et al (I am simplifying here), leaving you 100K for expenses. If your living expenses are 60K for rent, food, transportation, fun, family, you can save 40K a year for retirement. Let's say you earn 37% less. That's 126K. 60k goes away for taxes et al (I am simplifying here), leaving you 66K for expenses. If your living expenses are 60K for rent, food, transportation, fun, family, you can save 6K a year for retirement. Your savings just dropped by 85%, putting your retirement in danger.

Not saying OP shouldn't have accepted the offer. But let's not pretend this wasn't a significant pay cut.

There’s a fella on TikTok named Frank Niu. He made $500k at Netflix, and his job was basically to run around fixing things when they broke. It was a nice reminder that the good times can be very good, and the bad times are worth scaling back one’s expectations appropriately. I doubt he’d still be in the $500k bracket if he were still working, but you never know.

Also, don’t scale your living expenses! It’s tempting, but my current employer almost didn’t make me an offer because they assumed I was living at a $400k lifestyle. In reality we were just paying off our house and driving the same old car.

+1 on this. His #1 is exactly why you should not let work, and especially work social events, become the "primary shaper of your life" - they can and will get rid of you anytime they think it might be convenient for them. It may not have anything to do with your skills or productivity, it may be just what someone high above you felt like doing for reasons that have nothing to do with you.

I think that’s the wrong message to take away from this. The author’s problems wouldn’t have been solved by remaining more distant from his job and coworkers - he’d just be lonely all of the time!

The real answer is that you need to cultivate relationships and a life outside of work, too. By all means, become friendly with and get to know your coworkers, but don’t let work be your only source of relationships.