5 ms·

That's what happened during my first job almost 10 years ago. "we're different than other companies, we're family", "business is always personal", yadda yadda

That's what happened during my first job almost 10 years ago. "we're different than other companies, we're family", "business is always personal", yadda yadda Then one day out of nowhere "hey btw we're not going to renew your contract, we're nice so we give you an extra 10 days of vacation don't bother coming back tomorrow, oh and all your accesses have been revoked". At least I got the reality check right away, some people get that way down the line when their whole persona has already been built around their job

0xEF 2y ago
I think one has some deeper issues to tackle if one is basing their whole persona around their job. This is not a healthy thing to do, regardless of layoffs.
- pjc50 2y ago
  Difficult to avoid when there's lots of culture encouraging it, and especially once your hours are long enough that the rest of your life gets eroded.
  - lm28469 2y ago
    At some point there is a kind of sunk cost fallacy entering the game ("I can't reinvent my ego/persona now, I'm 40 it's too late"), and maybe some form of addiction ("I love my job and I would be bored without it") I know people who could easily retire or at least get a much chiller job but they stay in their high responsibility positions, complaining about it everyday, stressing them to the point of having physical consequences.
  - FridgeSeal 2y ago
    We also start, or encourage starting work quite early on in our lives, and so it naturally grabs a place in people’s existence in their formative years as “a thing that they do”. Is it any surprise then, that it naturally ends up becoming at least a non-trivial part of people’s sense-of-self?
    - bluGill 2y ago
      You have to work. If you really want to you can live on much less - rice and beans in a tiny apartment would let you live on a tiny income. However most people like luxuries in life. In addition, most jobs you cannot get anything done in an hour - it takes times to remember what I was doing the day before before I can write code again. For the above reasons you will be working a significant number of hours. As such work will be a significant part of your existence. I would hope you are doing things you enjoy, and that in turn means it becomes a part of you. The important thing though is make it an easy to replace part of you. Have other things you do. Hobbies, a family, sport, volunteer. There are lots of options. If something goes wrong in any of the above you have the rest to replace it. (family is the only one where you should strive to not have something go wrong - but even there it often does)
    - pjc50 2y ago
      We encourage starting work extremely late in advanced societies, due to the need to fit in education before then.
  - sneak 2y ago
    I can’t imagine how one would do this, period. No job has ever come anywhere near my persona. The people who do so have always seemed utterly insane to me. It’s a business transaction like buying a loaf of bread. Why do people act like it’s like getting married?
    - jajko 2y ago
      Peer pressure, if you were raised and lived life in such environment, its the default. Ie here in Geneva, Switzerland Calvinism originated. It promoted utter focus on work as a method of self-realization and achieving inner happiness by ie working hard consistently, finishing when work is done, not when its time to clock out and so on. Of course it wasn't designed with modern soulless corporations in mind, but there were number of jobs in the past veering on bullshit, although not so common. But yeah its a stupid approach in 2025. Find a passion. Not a hobby, not mowing lawn, or bbq, I mean passion that will make your heart pound and make you feel alive like you are a hormone-ladden teen. I have a few (hiking&camping in wild, climbing, via ferratas, alpinism, skiing, ski alpinism, diving etc), and then I juggle them based on what I can do. Then, corporate jobs with their wars and pressures will become just little broken kids playing zero sum games of who has bigger wiener, and can be safely and easily ignored.
- amelius 2y ago
  Someone should develop an LLM-therapist for this situation.
  - LtWorf 2y ago
    Little did he know that the therapist was one of the first AI that got invented, 40 years ago or so.
    - 0xEF 2y ago
      Eliza was developed in the mid-1960's, so that was more like 60 years ago, just for clarification.
      - secretsatan 2y ago
        Thanks for that, now I need a therapist for how old I'm feeling
    - amelius 2y ago
      Yes, but was it FDA approved?
    - nthingtohide 2y ago
      I feel like therapy is common-sense pattern matching and using evocative metaphors. Ofcourse, in old days, one had to be well read to know these metaphors and life experiences of others, but through social media such knowledge and other's life experiences are on my fingertips. Very glad that I can tap into society's experiences library.
- aziaziazi 2y ago
  I agree with the bad idea to put all your persona in a job. At the same time One will have issues if his persona doesn’t really match with his (min)8h/day 5days/week activity.
  - lm28469 2y ago
    It helps to find smallish but stable companies, making enough to be safe while not having crazy ambitions of 2x growth every xx months. It's much more relaxed, there is less office politics, churn rates are much lower, stress is non existent, &c. Usually they have older employees with families and a life outside of work.
  - lll-o-lll 2y ago
    > One will have issues if his persona doesn’t really match with his (min)8h/day 5days/week activity. I really don’t think that this is true. Plenty of people work boring repetitive jobs such as assembly line workers. Pick up the pay check, commence actual living. The dream is to work doing something that you love, but that’s not going to always pan out; and that’s ok.
    - marcosdumay 2y ago
      Assembly line workers invariably like assembling things. Even if they don't start liking it, they usually change their personas. The one job I can think of where the people really don't like is telemarketing. But it's a rare exception, and people tend to not stay on it.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      Most people who work those "boring" jobs have found ways to make it enjoyable. They still pick up their paycheck, but they have found some way to enjoy it. They talk the the person at the next station. They challenge themselves to how fast they can do thing (often the safety officer needs to stop them from getting better, which is itself a challenge)
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- tednoob 2y ago
  It happened to me, though I resigned when I hit burnout during covid. My whole identity was just being good at my job, and then I was no longer that. In part I think some blame is also to be placed on these companies who try to make the employees feel like a tribe or family. Since I've always been alone it was easy to slip into that false sense of belonging.
  - 0xEF 2y ago
    I'm sorry that happened to you. My own experience with burnout was pretty damning, but oddly, that happened with a career that was far more aligned with who I really am than my current career. There was a click, for me, that made me realize I cannot define myself by what I do for a paycheck and since then, my current career rarely comes up in IRL conversation, contrary to my HN history (which has more to do with my job being tech-related, so it fits in the context of HN comments). But you touched on something that I struggled with for years; a sense of belonging. Humans are, by nature, fairly tribal. That's both a good and bad thing. However, we as individuals have to be mindful about how much we are acting on our sense of belonging. At the extreme end, when we let our desire to belong to something larger than ourselves call the shots, we tend to get radicalized or fall into religious zealotry. On a more day-to-day experience, our sense of belonging can drive us to seek external validation from people who simply will not offer it, which spawns things like discontent and resentment that cause more irrational behavior and damage your self-worth. It's a slippery slope. What I have found is that being mindful about self-validation helps mitigate that. Reminding myself that I am good enough despite my flaws, I was not born to toil/be busy/make someone else rich, and my experiences and perspectives are valuable to me have become tools that help me make decisions about work/tasks that strategically avoid burnout. I never offer too much, and I know my limits very well, at this point. The result is most people see and respect that about me, where the ones that do not will quickly lose interest and move on to find someone they can successfully abuse.
  - floydian10 2y ago
    > Since I've always been alone it was easy to slip into that false sense of belonging. Same thing happened to me. Work was the first place where I felt I actually belonged and knew my own worth. It can be very intoxicating.
- bestouff 2y ago
  At one extremum there's e.g. Brad Pitt, how could you tell him not to base his whole persona around its job ?
  - lr4444lr 2y ago
    This is the premise of the movie Sunset Boulevard, and of the much newer The Subtance. Tl;dr, it's not healthy for celebrities either.
- aredox 2y ago
  You can't be aware of the toxicity when your parents, your teachers, your mentors, your bosses and your friends have all the same ethos (and actively put down any other opinion under slurs such as "socialism", "communism", "sloth", "failure of a human being", etc.)
  - wizzwizz4 2y ago
    You can: that's (part of) what fiction books are for.
    - aredox 2y ago
      Like The Fountainhead?
      - wizzwizz4 2y ago
        The Fountainhead has value in that it helps teach you that there are people who think like Ayn Rand. I wouldn't say it's particularly realistic, though: there are better books to learn about the world through. (But if you read more than two or three books, you'll quickly learn the problems with Ayn Rand's worldview.) Books aren't mutable in the same way that arguments are: you can actually sit and dissect a book, in a way that you can't dissect a politician's rhetoric or a parent's scorn. So… kinda, yes: even The Fountainhead is worth reading, to some people (not that I'd recommend it).
      - dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
        Can add Atlas Shrugged and Nineteen Eighty-Four to the list.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    > "socialism", "communism", Both of them as Marx defined them are incompatible with other ideas and so deserve slurs. There are progressive ideologies with influence from Marx that do allow for other ideas to exist. There are many people who will throw away all of liberal philosophy for pure socialism. As soon as you allow for the liberal differences in outcome you have to agree for there won't be true socialism and you have to debate what (if any!) level of safety net you provide and further accept there should not be agreement. This isn't just that we won't agree, but the strong statement that an agreement would be a bad thing.
- dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
  >I think one has some deeper issues to tackle if one is basing their whole persona around their job. This is not a healthy thing to do, regardless of layoffs. True, I got to wonder if people who write these posts have any healthy relationships at all? Surely they would have had parents/relatives/friends etc. speak of layoffs?
agumonkey 2y ago
One thing that astonishes me, is that most people want to have a real team to be part of, contribute, give our best.. yet most jobs are just a game of lies and end up being the opposite (there are some good bosses but the stats are low). It's like two needs that can never meet.
- bravetraveler 2y ago
  The purpose of the system is what it does
  - CharlieDigital 2y ago
    The whole system of education is designed to channel this type of behavior from early childhood. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big proponent of high quality public education; it's a necessity. But the reason we have it is because businesses and corporations need workers.
    - elzbardico 2y ago
      Obedient workers.
    - agumonkey 2y ago
      if I assume that the system is a neutral emergent phenomenon, i'd say it values "skills" required by businesses because these are strong indicator of what ensures survival of the group (we might all study cosmology and get hawking IQ level in the end, if we don't know how to grow food, we're toast) that said i'm curious if there are cities or groups who reduce the importance of material economy / business and promote real deep and beautiful learning
      - CRConrad 2y ago
        > (we might all study cosmology and get hawking IQ level in the end, if we don't know how to grow food, we're toast) I first read that as "we might all study cosmetology ...", so my mind went to an altogether different space-based metaphor.
zwnow 2y ago
I dont get it, everyone wants to work for big tech or big corporations in general and then wonder why they do stuff like this. Go to small companies, yes they pay less but also yes: you will have real impact and they actually need you.
- n_ary 2y ago
  Nah, small companies are burnout mills. Early in my career, I had explicitly worked on small companies and 4/4 times screwed over. Immediately when the big work is done and investments(or major profits) are in, suddenly the management starts replacing everyone with expensive consultants or their best chums from some failed business somewhere and starts strategic push out by stagnating. While my experience can be rare/unique, at least at Medium/BigCo, my soul burning gets compensated, small ones are just “we are like family right?” and then push out once technical/financial growth starts rearing its head.
  - JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
    I’ve worked for the smallest startups (2 employees) to the biggest company (100k employees). Everything can bring you burnout if the management is toxic. It’s independent on the size of the company. I’m now working for a small company that feels like a family even if they don’t say it.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Small companies can have their own problems. They may only somewhat overlap with the problems at big companies--although both need to make money at the end of the day. But they're far from a panacea.
- klooney 2y ago
  Big companies can double your compensation though, it's a tradeoff.
- caseyy 2y ago
  I also thought that small companies are better in that regard. But no, they often have their own toxic idiosyncrasies, like when a little power goes too much to the management’s heads. A small company that’s YOURS is better and actually needs you.
j-bos 2y ago
> their whole persona has already been built around their job Maybe this is one of the unspoken goals of bringing people back to the office.
rightbyte 2y ago
I think a fundamental reason is that some people build their identity around the only community they are a part of -- their job. Like, book clubs, political parties, community centres, sport associations etc used to be the place for that. And work was also a place for that. My parent generation worked at like 3 different employees in their whole career.
Tade0 2y ago
Mine was before my career started in earnest as I took a job during one of the summer breaks in college, worked 10-11h a day with a commute of 3h in total on top of that without even having a contract on paper only for my employer to first suggest I work for minimum wage and then not pay me at all after the first month. Naturally, I walked, but to this day I can't believe how naive/stupid I was back then.
charles_f 2y ago
> we're family My family doesn't give me performance reviews.

0xEF 2y ago

I think one has some deeper issues to tackle if one is basing their whole persona around their job. This is not a healthy thing to do, regardless of layoffs.

pjc50 2y ago
Difficult to avoid when there's lots of culture encouraging it, and especially once your hours are long enough that the rest of your life gets eroded.
- lm28469 2y ago
  At some point there is a kind of sunk cost fallacy entering the game ("I can't reinvent my ego/persona now, I'm 40 it's too late"), and maybe some form of addiction ("I love my job and I would be bored without it") I know people who could easily retire or at least get a much chiller job but they stay in their high responsibility positions, complaining about it everyday, stressing them to the point of having physical consequences.
- FridgeSeal 2y ago
  We also start, or encourage starting work quite early on in our lives, and so it naturally grabs a place in people’s existence in their formative years as “a thing that they do”. Is it any surprise then, that it naturally ends up becoming at least a non-trivial part of people’s sense-of-self?
  - bluGill 2y ago
    You have to work. If you really want to you can live on much less - rice and beans in a tiny apartment would let you live on a tiny income. However most people like luxuries in life. In addition, most jobs you cannot get anything done in an hour - it takes times to remember what I was doing the day before before I can write code again. For the above reasons you will be working a significant number of hours. As such work will be a significant part of your existence. I would hope you are doing things you enjoy, and that in turn means it becomes a part of you. The important thing though is make it an easy to replace part of you. Have other things you do. Hobbies, a family, sport, volunteer. There are lots of options. If something goes wrong in any of the above you have the rest to replace it. (family is the only one where you should strive to not have something go wrong - but even there it often does)
  - pjc50 2y ago
    We encourage starting work extremely late in advanced societies, due to the need to fit in education before then.
- sneak 2y ago
  I can’t imagine how one would do this, period. No job has ever come anywhere near my persona. The people who do so have always seemed utterly insane to me. It’s a business transaction like buying a loaf of bread. Why do people act like it’s like getting married?
  - jajko 2y ago
    Peer pressure, if you were raised and lived life in such environment, its the default. Ie here in Geneva, Switzerland Calvinism originated. It promoted utter focus on work as a method of self-realization and achieving inner happiness by ie working hard consistently, finishing when work is done, not when its time to clock out and so on. Of course it wasn't designed with modern soulless corporations in mind, but there were number of jobs in the past veering on bullshit, although not so common. But yeah its a stupid approach in 2025. Find a passion. Not a hobby, not mowing lawn, or bbq, I mean passion that will make your heart pound and make you feel alive like you are a hormone-ladden teen. I have a few (hiking&camping in wild, climbing, via ferratas, alpinism, skiing, ski alpinism, diving etc), and then I juggle them based on what I can do. Then, corporate jobs with their wars and pressures will become just little broken kids playing zero sum games of who has bigger wiener, and can be safely and easily ignored.
amelius 2y ago
Someone should develop an LLM-therapist for this situation.
- LtWorf 2y ago
  Little did he know that the therapist was one of the first AI that got invented, 40 years ago or so.
  - 0xEF 2y ago
    Eliza was developed in the mid-1960's, so that was more like 60 years ago, just for clarification.
    - secretsatan 2y ago
      Thanks for that, now I need a therapist for how old I'm feeling
  - amelius 2y ago
    Yes, but was it FDA approved?
  - nthingtohide 2y ago
    I feel like therapy is common-sense pattern matching and using evocative metaphors. Ofcourse, in old days, one had to be well read to know these metaphors and life experiences of others, but through social media such knowledge and other's life experiences are on my fingertips. Very glad that I can tap into society's experiences library.
aziaziazi 2y ago
I agree with the bad idea to put all your persona in a job. At the same time One will have issues if his persona doesn’t really match with his (min)8h/day 5days/week activity.
- lm28469 2y ago
  It helps to find smallish but stable companies, making enough to be safe while not having crazy ambitions of 2x growth every xx months. It's much more relaxed, there is less office politics, churn rates are much lower, stress is non existent, &c. Usually they have older employees with families and a life outside of work.
- lll-o-lll 2y ago
  > One will have issues if his persona doesn’t really match with his (min)8h/day 5days/week activity. I really don’t think that this is true. Plenty of people work boring repetitive jobs such as assembly line workers. Pick up the pay check, commence actual living. The dream is to work doing something that you love, but that’s not going to always pan out; and that’s ok.
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    Assembly line workers invariably like assembling things. Even if they don't start liking it, they usually change their personas. The one job I can think of where the people really don't like is telemarketing. But it's a rare exception, and people tend to not stay on it.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Most people who work those "boring" jobs have found ways to make it enjoyable. They still pick up their paycheck, but they have found some way to enjoy it. They talk the the person at the next station. They challenge themselves to how fast they can do thing (often the safety officer needs to stop them from getting better, which is itself a challenge)
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
tednoob 2y ago
It happened to me, though I resigned when I hit burnout during covid. My whole identity was just being good at my job, and then I was no longer that. In part I think some blame is also to be placed on these companies who try to make the employees feel like a tribe or family. Since I've always been alone it was easy to slip into that false sense of belonging.
- 0xEF 2y ago
  I'm sorry that happened to you. My own experience with burnout was pretty damning, but oddly, that happened with a career that was far more aligned with who I really am than my current career. There was a click, for me, that made me realize I cannot define myself by what I do for a paycheck and since then, my current career rarely comes up in IRL conversation, contrary to my HN history (which has more to do with my job being tech-related, so it fits in the context of HN comments). But you touched on something that I struggled with for years; a sense of belonging. Humans are, by nature, fairly tribal. That's both a good and bad thing. However, we as individuals have to be mindful about how much we are acting on our sense of belonging. At the extreme end, when we let our desire to belong to something larger than ourselves call the shots, we tend to get radicalized or fall into religious zealotry. On a more day-to-day experience, our sense of belonging can drive us to seek external validation from people who simply will not offer it, which spawns things like discontent and resentment that cause more irrational behavior and damage your self-worth. It's a slippery slope. What I have found is that being mindful about self-validation helps mitigate that. Reminding myself that I am good enough despite my flaws, I was not born to toil/be busy/make someone else rich, and my experiences and perspectives are valuable to me have become tools that help me make decisions about work/tasks that strategically avoid burnout. I never offer too much, and I know my limits very well, at this point. The result is most people see and respect that about me, where the ones that do not will quickly lose interest and move on to find someone they can successfully abuse.
- floydian10 2y ago
  > Since I've always been alone it was easy to slip into that false sense of belonging. Same thing happened to me. Work was the first place where I felt I actually belonged and knew my own worth. It can be very intoxicating.
bestouff 2y ago
At one extremum there's e.g. Brad Pitt, how could you tell him not to base his whole persona around its job ?
- lr4444lr 2y ago
  This is the premise of the movie Sunset Boulevard, and of the much newer The Subtance. Tl;dr, it's not healthy for celebrities either.
aredox 2y ago
You can't be aware of the toxicity when your parents, your teachers, your mentors, your bosses and your friends have all the same ethos (and actively put down any other opinion under slurs such as "socialism", "communism", "sloth", "failure of a human being", etc.)
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  You can: that's (part of) what fiction books are for.
  - aredox 2y ago
    Like The Fountainhead?
    - wizzwizz4 2y ago
      The Fountainhead has value in that it helps teach you that there are people who think like Ayn Rand. I wouldn't say it's particularly realistic, though: there are better books to learn about the world through. (But if you read more than two or three books, you'll quickly learn the problems with Ayn Rand's worldview.) Books aren't mutable in the same way that arguments are: you can actually sit and dissect a book, in a way that you can't dissect a politician's rhetoric or a parent's scorn. So… kinda, yes: even The Fountainhead is worth reading, to some people (not that I'd recommend it).
    - dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
      Can add Atlas Shrugged and Nineteen Eighty-Four to the list.
- bluGill 2y ago
  > "socialism", "communism", Both of them as Marx defined them are incompatible with other ideas and so deserve slurs. There are progressive ideologies with influence from Marx that do allow for other ideas to exist. There are many people who will throw away all of liberal philosophy for pure socialism. As soon as you allow for the liberal differences in outcome you have to agree for there won't be true socialism and you have to debate what (if any!) level of safety net you provide and further accept there should not be agreement. This isn't just that we won't agree, but the strong statement that an agreement would be a bad thing.
dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
>I think one has some deeper issues to tackle if one is basing their whole persona around their job. This is not a healthy thing to do, regardless of layoffs. True, I got to wonder if people who write these posts have any healthy relationships at all? Surely they would have had parents/relatives/friends etc. speak of layoffs?

agumonkey 2y ago

One thing that astonishes me, is that most people want to have a real team to be part of, contribute, give our best.. yet most jobs are just a game of lies and end up being the opposite (there are some good bosses but the stats are low). It's like two needs that can never meet.

bravetraveler 2y ago
The purpose of the system is what it does
- CharlieDigital 2y ago
  The whole system of education is designed to channel this type of behavior from early childhood. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big proponent of high quality public education; it's a necessity. But the reason we have it is because businesses and corporations need workers.
  - elzbardico 2y ago
    Obedient workers.
  - agumonkey 2y ago
    if I assume that the system is a neutral emergent phenomenon, i'd say it values "skills" required by businesses because these are strong indicator of what ensures survival of the group (we might all study cosmology and get hawking IQ level in the end, if we don't know how to grow food, we're toast) that said i'm curious if there are cities or groups who reduce the importance of material economy / business and promote real deep and beautiful learning
    - CRConrad 2y ago
      > (we might all study cosmology and get hawking IQ level in the end, if we don't know how to grow food, we're toast) I first read that as "we might all study cosmetology ...", so my mind went to an altogether different space-based metaphor.

zwnow 2y ago

I dont get it, everyone wants to work for big tech or big corporations in general and then wonder why they do stuff like this. Go to small companies, yes they pay less but also yes: you will have real impact and they actually need you.

n_ary 2y ago
Nah, small companies are burnout mills. Early in my career, I had explicitly worked on small companies and 4/4 times screwed over. Immediately when the big work is done and investments(or major profits) are in, suddenly the management starts replacing everyone with expensive consultants or their best chums from some failed business somewhere and starts strategic push out by stagnating. While my experience can be rare/unique, at least at Medium/BigCo, my soul burning gets compensated, small ones are just “we are like family right?” and then push out once technical/financial growth starts rearing its head.
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
  I’ve worked for the smallest startups (2 employees) to the biggest company (100k employees). Everything can bring you burnout if the management is toxic. It’s independent on the size of the company. I’m now working for a small company that feels like a family even if they don’t say it.
ghaff 2y ago
Small companies can have their own problems. They may only somewhat overlap with the problems at big companies--although both need to make money at the end of the day. But they're far from a panacea.
klooney 2y ago
Big companies can double your compensation though, it's a tradeoff.
caseyy 2y ago
I also thought that small companies are better in that regard. But no, they often have their own toxic idiosyncrasies, like when a little power goes too much to the management’s heads. A small company that’s YOURS is better and actually needs you.

j-bos 2y ago

> their whole persona has already been built around their job Maybe this is one of the unspoken goals of bringing people back to the office.

rightbyte 2y ago

I think a fundamental reason is that some people build their identity around the only community they are a part of -- their job. Like, book clubs, political parties, community centres, sport associations etc used to be the place for that. And work was also a place for that. My parent generation worked at like 3 different employees in their whole career.

Tade0 2y ago

Mine was before my career started in earnest as I took a job during one of the summer breaks in college, worked 10-11h a day with a commute of 3h in total on top of that without even having a contract on paper only for my employer to first suggest I work for minimum wage and then not pay me at all after the first month. Naturally, I walked, but to this day I can't believe how naive/stupid I was back then.

charles_f 2y ago

> we're family My family doesn't give me performance reviews.