> scale up that leaned woke [...] feel good mission [...] all out mental health crisis [...]
> FAANG [...] emotional vibe is somewhere between the two [...] Coworkers that came from tougher places (finance, Microsoft, Amazon) are holding it together fine. Others are not.
Rather than attributing this to some employees being made of more-anxious stuff, could this also be explained by:
* Concern about personal financial safety net (war chest, family money, connections, job market for them at that time)?
* Concern about being able to find another work situation that they like (including perceived woke feel-good mission, and like-minded colleagues, for those people)?
First, everybody is capable of anxiety and that's normal and to be expected in the current climate.
> a scale up that leaned woke [...] When layoffs happened, it was basically an all out mental health crisis, with everyone feeding into everyone else's anxiety.
Second, having an anxiety disorder is not a moral or behavioral failure and I don't see necessarily how it could be correlated to "wokeness".
> When you squeeze an orange, orange juice comes out because that's what an orange is made off. If extreme anxiety comes out when you are squeezed, it was there all along.
Again, this analogy doesn't make sense. It's totally normal for oranges to be full of orange juice. It would be weird if something else (or no thing at all) came out... Same with anxiety - it's normal for people to be stressed out in a stressful situation. It's not necessarily healthy, but should be expected.
Otoh, having an anxiety disorder is not a normal psychological state, but that's something that shows up all the time, not just when you're "squeezed".
You’re right that this doesn’t mean that people who are more anxious have somehow failed morally or behaviorally, and also right that nobody is immune to anxiety altogether.
But I don’t think they were saying those things. They were just saying that some people are capable of navigating stuff like job loss with confidence and sharing their experience of environments that seemed to have proportionately more or less of those people.
I do think that on net it read as dismissive to the real personal experience of the “oranges” who are highlighted in the article, but also think you’re responding to things that weren’t said there.
You are exactly right in what I am saying and there's a part of me that hopes some people are inspired by this information to build up their resilience
This may be true, but I think that this is also something that can be learned, at least to a good degree. Personally I feel I have managed to become less anxiety-prone through conscious effort and introspective work. Being an "orange" is not an immutable fact.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/unique-everybody-els...
(References at the bottom)
Selection bias in your data is a huge problem.
Can we offer them some understanding and sympathy?
> promise them unprecedented compensation
They were promised and received uncompensated compensation. No promises of indefinite employment were ever given, and it’s a bit naive to assume boom times never end. I think it’s fair to make this point too, even if on an individual level I sympathize with pretty much anyone that loses their job.
Obviously this is going to happen, I am not shocked or surprised and I get how it can cause anxiety to emerge.
I do think there's a connection between resilience (as you observed in your other response) and entitlement. I am not sure which way causality flows but you wrote: "promise them unprecedented compensation" - I feel like there's also a realistic mindset that should go with interpreting that: I am hired to do a job and things could change (vs something like I get this comp because the universe knows I am the shit or something like that)
If you make over 200k a year in a booming market, no.
Are you some sort of bad person for making what the market pays you?
It reeks of jealousy and brazen callousness because someone has secured compensation outside their reach or imagination.
I don’t get it.
If you don't have family that can help you and you grew up eating out of soup kitchens, you're going to have a very different attitude to the prospect of job loss (even if you're "making decent money" at one of these "woke companies") than someone who comes from money and didn't have these issues growing up.
You're less likely to take risks, and you're more likely to pursue more secure careers (tech being a good one of late).
Now that tech is not looking so safe anymore, of course there are a lot of people who are having full on crises.
Dismissing those people as "being made of anxiety" fails to acknowledge the factors that caused the situation in the first place. Sure, someone with a wealthy family isn't freaking out right now, and they're probably less anxious in general. They have good reason to not care about maybe getting laid off, just as the people who are quite worried about it have good reasons to be anxious about getting laid off
1. A global pandemic that has killed nearly 7 million people worldwide.
2. The start of a large war between a nuclear power and a country in Europe supported by another nuclear power.
3. Minor thing, an attempt to overthrow the US government.
Perhaps anxiety accumulates?
i wonder what "very major" problems are for you if these are "very minor".
1. Also plenty upside (eg normalization of working from home) that has impacted most ppl I know very directly.
2. Yes but also doesn't impact us on daily basis and whether we think about it a lot or none at all doesn't change anything.
3. Lol.
As if mental health couldn't negatively change in a matter of weeks or months.
This rings true to me too. Another factor I'll highlight is the average age of the employees. I'm older than most of those I work with. I've been through rounds of layoffs at other companies. It's stressful, but I know how it happens and what to expect. A lot of them have worked their entire careers at successful companies during good times. They're freaking out because they haven't been through it before.
I used to work at a hedge fund that basically screened for mental health during hiring. When we had layoffs, nobody freaked out. We knew we had a good run, we knew severance was good and we knew we'd be highly desirable in the market. So we metabolized the layoffs and went on with our lives.
My job after that was at a scale up that leaned woke (a lot of employees were sold a tenuous connection between our work and a feel good mission). When layoffs happened, it was basically an all out mental health crisis, with everyone feeding into everyone else's anxiety. The facts weren't that different than at the hedge fund but the amount of angst and freaking out was through the roof.
Now at a FAANG, obviously had layoffs recently. The emotional vibe is somewhere between the two above. Coworkers that came from tougher places (finance, Microsoft, Amazon) are holding it together fine. Others are not.
I once heard the analogy of an orange. When you squeeze an orange, orange juice comes out because that's what an orange is made off. If extreme anxiety comes out when you are squeezed, it was there all along.