This essay was being shared by millennials and Gen Xers for a while on Twitter (including ex-Google employees), so I thought I'd place it here since it apparently resonates with many of them. The person who wrote this apparently worked at Buzzfeed for a while:
I recommend it. But a bunch of Google people sharing this? LMAO, there were literally learning six figures as elite techies, yet they are still moaning about getting laid off by Google. They can just get another job in literally any other tech field. Having Google on your resume will get you hired at a LOT of other places.
The company was and is a digital media company, which is another way of saying that it uses its placement within the journalism industry to mask or at least distract from some of its most egregious, obnoxious, or otherwise nonsensical start-up behaviors. I watched entire departments unceremoniously let go because they weren’t making enough money, even though the company had openly refused attempts to monetize their content.
...
When I started at BuzzFeed, I had been in academia for nine years. I knew what it felt like to wake up every morning with an anxious pit of despair about your future employment. None of the precarity of digital media was new to me; in fact, it meshed seamlessly with the lessons I’d internalized graduating into the aftermath of the Dot-Com burst and watching the Great Recession decimate the academic landscape. None of this was unique to me, either. “My relationship with my work is one of mistrust,” one millennial worker told Clio Chang in 2020. “I have very little trust for the system and for people running systems.”
“My relationship with my work is one of mistrust,” one millennial worker told Clio Chang in 2020. “I have very little trust for the system and for people running systems.”
We knew to expect nothing, to trust no company, to rely on no promised path. It was exhausting, but what other choice did we have? At least I had a job, if an utterly insecure one.
...
I live, save, and cultivate side gigs as if the bottom can and will drop out at any moment. You could call this good business sense, or you could call it the strategy of a brain irrevocably shaped by the Great Recession, academia, and digital media layoff culture. A millennial brain, but also, I’d argue, a boomer brain, a Gen-X brain, and now — a Gen-Z brain. And just because hundreds of thousands of other people share that posture doesn’t mean it has to be this way.
...
Workers have been socialized to absorb the risk previously shouldered by corporations
...
Denigrating younger generations’ higher expectations is just another way of saying you’ve internalized the understanding that you should have none — which permits companies to behave accordingly. Layoff Brain is terrified of Layoffs, but it also readily excuses them: this is just the way things are, even if the way things are makes no sense.
...
This is the second iteration of Layoff Brain. The first is the Layoff Brain I have, the one I share with millions of other millennials and Gen-Xers. It’s a defensive crouch masquerading as “smart saving habits.” It’s a thrum of fear and student debt default and medical bankruptcy rebranded as “hustle culture.” This form of Layoff Brain copes by planning obsessively or ignoring aggressively, both with their own form of everyday or eventual suffering. It normalizes precarity and understands the responsibility for protecting against it as a personal responsibility. Let’s call it Worker Layoff Brain.
I recommend it. But a bunch of Google people sharing this? LMAO, there were literally learning six figures as elite techies, yet they are still moaning about getting laid off by Google. They can just get another job in literally any other tech field. Having Google on your resume will get you hired at a LOT of other places.