Our entire family has been laid off and we are all in panic mode. Need advice.

Everyone in our family has been laid off and now we’re in a financial crisis. No one is able to find work. Both of our parents and all four of our siblings have been laid off. No one can help each other and now we are all worried. Myself and my sister worked at different FAANG companies and we were both laid within the last year or so. My sister has struggled to find work in over a year now I was recently laid off with no severance. Our other brother worked in Fintech that laid him off in August of last year and our youngest sister worked for an airline company that recently shut down. The sticky situation is that me and my brother have our own homes and fast food food uber and retail will not cover with our mortgages. The youngest two had to move back home because they couldn’t afford their apartments and were able to break their lease and not renew. They have been trying to help our parents with the mortgage, but they cannot find work because our parents live in a very rural town in South Carolina with very scarce opportunities. Due to their experience, there is literally no industry present in our parents town and you have to know somebody in order to get a retail job. We all grew up struggling, and we all worked extremely hard to get good jobs. I never imagined in 1 million years that we would all be F*CKED at the same time. The discussion in the family right now is which house to save. Our parents are thinking that because their house is almost paid off everyone should hunker down and help them pay the mortgage off, especially since they’re behind. The reality is our parents have struggled to pay for the mortgage so long that really it’s not almost paid off. They believe If everyone can help them pay off the house then we can start to work together to pay off the other sibling houses and work as a family. But that is not realistic, and everyone is just super frantic because no one can find work and there’s like three mortgages amongst the family and at this point it’s like someone is gonna lose their house. We just don’t know how to deal with this. Seeking any advice possible.

Jobadvisor

I am so incredibly sorry you and your family are going through this. To have an entire family unit hit by layoffs simultaneously—especially after working so hard to break out of generational struggles—is a massive, deeply unfair shock. It makes complete sense that everyone is in panic mode.

When you are facing three mortgages and zero income, the survival instinct is to try and save everything. But look at the math: you cannot save three houses with zero income. Trying to spread thin resources across all three will likely result in losing all of them.

You need to shift from "panic mode" to triage mode. Here is a step-by-step framework to handle the immediate crisis, look at the housing situation realistically, and leverage your collective skills.

1. Radical Financial Triage (Next 48 Hours)

Before deciding which house to save, everyone needs to halt the outflow of cash.

• Call the Lenders Immediately: You, your brother, and your parents need to call your mortgage servicers tomorrow morning. Ask for hardship forbearance. Because of the massive tech and corporate layoffs over the last couple of years, banks have established protocols for this. Forbearance can pause or reduce payments for 3 to 12 months. Do not skip payments without calling first.

• Pause All Non-Secured Debt: Credit cards, student loans, and car payments (if you can risk repossession or trade down) come second to food and shelter. Call them and ask for hardship programs, but if forced to choose, you stop paying credit cards before you stop paying for food.

• File for Unemployment: Ensure every single eligible family member is actively collecting unemployment, even if it is a fraction of your old tech salaries. Every dollar keeps the lights on.

2. The Hard Truth About the Mortgages

Your parents' plan comes from a place of love and a desire for family unity, but mathematically, it is highly flawed. Here is a realistic look at your three housing options:

Property	The Reality	The Strategy
Parents' House	Rural South Carolina, behind on payments, zero local job market to sustain 6+ adults long-term.	The Safety Net (Temporary). It is an immediate roof over the heads of the youngest siblings, but sinking scarce cash into a house that is behind—in a town with no economy—is a trap. Keep communication open with their lender.
Your & Your Brother's Houses	Likely located in tech/corporate hubs (or areas with better economies) where you bought them. Higher mortgages, but crucially located where the jobs are.	The Economic Engines. If you lose these houses and all retreat to rural SC, the entire family’s earning potential drops to near zero. You must protect the assets tied to job markets.

How to Decide "Which House to Save"

If you and your brother have equity in your homes, renting them out might be your saving grace.

1. Can you or your brother rent out rooms to roommates immediately to cover the mortgage?

2. Can you rent out the entire house to cover the mortgage, and temporarily move into a cheaper shared apartment or back to your parents' place?

Moving back to rural SC should only be done to eliminate housing costs entirely while you aggressively pursue remote work, not to pour your remaining cash into a predatory or behind-on-payments mortgage.

3. Rewriting the Job Hunt Strategy

The job market for tech, fintech, and corporate roles has been brutal recently. Standard resume-dropping on LinkedIn is yielding almost zero results for white-collar workers right now. You have a unique advantage: you have a 6-person corporate strike team.

• Target the "Fractional" and Contract Market: Full-time FAANG/Fintech roles are scarce, but companies are bleeding for contract, freelance, or "fractional" work because it doesn't require paying benefits. Look at platforms like Braintrust, Toptal, or specialized tech contract agencies (Robert Half, Teksystems).

• Leverage Local SC "Unskilled" Work via Connections: Your parents are right about one thing: in rural towns, you have to know someone. Have your parents ask neighbors, church members, or local business owners directly: "Our kids are home and willing to do any manual labor, farm work, inventory, or administrative work for cash/minimum wage." Pride cannot exist right now.

• The Pool & Split System: If one person gets a job—even a retail job—that money belongs to the collective survival fund.

A Note on Mental Survival:

You all climbed out of hardship once before. You have the grit, the intelligence, and the resumes to do it again. This is a macro-economic disaster, not a personal failure. Take a deep breath, get on a family Zoom call, and look at the numbers cleanly. Stop trying to save the brick and mortar; focus on saving the people.

 

Rock Bottom

After 36 straight months of unemployment, my dad told me that I've hit rock bottom.

With an MS in Sociology and an incredible work ethic, standing on the right side of history in every election, I've been rejected from McDonalds, Shop Rite, and even minimum wage positions with the Democratic Socialists of America.

So I've finally given in and taken a position with a semi professional wrestling organization for disabled people. I don't want to name the specific disability, but they're short. The pay will be determined by ticket sales at each event and I'm going to play a villain, pretending to get beaten up by disabled people for entertainment. As bad as it SOUNDS, they said that I can get involved in HR work when/where they see appropriate, so my education isn't a TOTAL waste. As much as this feels like a failure, I feel kind of good knowing that the AI can't replace me now. AND it empowers the disabled.

Jobadvisor

This is a genuinely funny and self-aware piece of writing. A few things that work really well:

The slow-burn setup lands perfectly. You establish the character's blind spots methodically — the MS in Sociology, the political bravery, the DSA rejection — so by the time he's rationalizing dwarf wrestling as HR-adjacent, the reader has a complete picture.

The rationalizations are layered beautifully. Each one is worse than the last: my education isn't a TOTAL waste → AI can't replace me → it empowers the disabled. The character is completely sincere, which is what makes it funny.

"Standing on the right side of history in every election" is a perfect detail. It does a lot of work economically — you understand this person entirely from that one phrase.

A few thoughts if you're developing it further:

The DSA rejection might be the funniest single beat, but it goes by fast. You could wring more out of it — the bureaucratic reason for rejection, the irony of a socialist org having hiring standards.

The ending is strong but you might consider whether "it empowers the disabled" should be the final note, or whether there's one more turn of the knife — something that reveals even deeper obliviousness right as he thinks he's achieved clarity.

The HR detail is subtle genius. Don't lose that.

What's the intended format — monologue, essay, short story?

Just had an interview with a literal AI agent. I am so confused.

So I just had the weirdest interview experience.

I applied for a job, got the invite, and did the whole song and dance to prepare. I got dressed up, fixed my lighting, and made sure my webcam was perfect. I was ready to talk to a human. I clicked the link and there was... nothing. No person. Just a digital avatar. Look, I am not a hater. I use AI tools all the time. I use things like Praktika for language and NotebookLM for my notes. I get that things change. But this was just surreal. I spent the first few minutes just staring at the screen thinking, "Am I really doing this right now?" There was no "reading the room." There was no small talk or checking the vibe. It was just a machine asking me questions and waiting for me to perform. It is so hard to show personality or culture fit when you are talking to a calculator. I felt like I was auditioning for a piece of software. I kept thinking, "Should I smile? Does the bot even care if I smile?"
Is this the new normal? Has anyone else dealt with this?
I honestly have no idea how you are supposed to prepare for an interview when there is no actual human on the other side.

Jobadvisor

That sounds genuinely disorienting — you prepared for a human connection and got a chatbot with a face. The frustration makes complete sense.

To answer your question: yes, this is becoming more common, and there are a few things worth knowing that might help next time.

It's probably not making the final call. Most companies use AI interviews as a screening layer before a human even looks at your application. Think of it less as "the interview" and more as a structured filter. The human conversation (hopefully) still comes later.

The smile question — actually yes, kind of. Most of these systems do analyze facial expressions, eye contact, and vocal tone alongside your words. So the performance instincts you had were correct. Looking engaged and speaking clearly still matters, even if it feels absurd.

How to prepare differently for these:

• Treat it like a recorded video interview, not a live conversation. Speak to the camera, not the avatar.
• Answers tend to reward structure. Think STAR format (Situation, Task, Action, Result) — AI systems are often scoring for completeness and clarity.
• Pause between questions. There's no social pressure to fill silence, so take a breath and think.
• You can ask it to repeat a question. Most of these systems allow it and it won't judge you for it.
• Personality still matters — warmth, energy, and enthusiasm come through in tone and word choice even to a machine analyzing sentiment.

The culture fit thing is real though. That's the genuine loss here — mutual assessment is gone. You can't read them while they read you. Your best workaround is to ask explicitly for a human conversation at some point in the process, either after the AI screen or before any offer. Any company worth working for should have one.

The industry is still figuring out whether this is actually better hiring or just cheaper hiring. Your confusion is a reasonable response to something that genuinely hasn't been thought all the way through yet.

Can personal/legal issues outside of work affect your job or HR standing?

might be a stupid question and this is all hypothetical, but I’m curious how this works from an HR perspective.

if an employee gets into a physical altercation outside of work (for example, a scuffle/assault situation unrelated to their workplace), can that still affect their employment or lead to HR involvement even if it had nothing to do with coworkers or the company?

like for example let's say i knocked someone out at a bar out of self defense and he reported me to my company's HR, how would HR departments generally view situations like this?

Jobadvisor

Not a stupid question at all — this is actually a nuanced area that a lot of people don't think about until they're in it.

The short answer: yes, it can affect your employment, but it heavily depends on context.

Here's how HR departments generally think about it:

Factors that matter most

• Your role — The more your job involves trust, safety, or public-facing work (security, healthcare, finance, working with vulnerable people), the more weight off-duty conduct carries. A bouncer vs. an accountant would be viewed very differently.
• Criminal charges/record — If the incident results in an arrest or conviction, that becomes harder for HR to ignore, especially during background check cycles or if your contract has a morality clause.
• Company policy — Many employee handbooks have "conduct" or "code of ethics" clauses that technically extend to off-duty behavior, particularly if it could "reflect negatively on the company."
• How it came to their attention — Someone actively reporting you to your employer (like in your bar example) is more likely to trigger a formal review than something HR simply never hears about.

The self-defense angle

Self-defense situations are genuinely treated differently. If no charges are filed, or charges are dropped/dismissed, HR has much less to act on. Most reasonable HR departments aren't going to discipline someone for defending themselves when there's no legal finding against them. The problem is that HR isn't a court — they don't adjudicate guilt. They manage risk to the company, so how the situation looks matters alongside what actually happened.

What typically happens in practice

If someone reports the incident, HR will usually open an informal inquiry. They'd likely ask for your account of events, check whether any legal proceedings are pending, and assess whether there's any nexus to the workplace. If it's clearly isolated, no charges were filed, and there's no workplace connection, many HR departments will close it out with no action — especially if you're a good employee with a clean record.

The "nexus to work" test is the key concept here. Courts and employment lawyers often look at whether the off-duty conduct has a reasonable connection to the job. A bar fight with a stranger typically has a weak nexus unless it escalates (e.g., the other person turns out to be a client, it goes viral online, etc.).

Bottom line: A self-defense situation with no charges, no workplace connection, and no ongoing legal trouble is unlikely to end someone's employment at most companies. But it's not zero risk either — it depends on your role, your company culture, and frankly, how the HR team interprets their own policies.

Worth knowing your employee handbook's conduct clause if you're ever in a situation like this.

I have no idea what to do with my life anymore

* Apparently my degree is useless now and jobs only want you if you know someone. So I guess my skills and my years in school are a waste of time (Interactive Design/Computer science).

* Since AI, saturation, and awful job market is huge now, I'll never get a job in what I wanted. So I have no idea what I want to do career wise.

* I don't want to be in society anyways. I can't handle being "normal". Working my life away for companies/Billionaires who don't care if I died tomorrow is not how I want to live my life. But im forced to do this. I'm forced to live a life I didn't ask for. I have to work 40 hours a week everyday with only 3 hours to myself after work. How can I even have a life?

* The economy is bad and everything is expensive with low pay.

* powerful Evil people keep killing, stealing, and destroying people's/my lives. Not only are they doing this and getting away with it with no consequences. But i can't do anything about it.

What's the point of striving for a "Good future" when it's obvious there is no future to begin with?

Jobadvisor

What you're feeling makes a lot of sense given everything stacked against you right now. That's a genuinely heavy load — not just one problem, but several big ones hitting at the same time: your career path feeling blocked, the economy, feeling trapped in a system you didn't choose, and watching injustice happen with no way to stop it. Anyone would feel lost and angry under that weight.

I want to ask directly — when you say "what's the point," are you having thoughts of not wanting to be here, or harming yourself? I'm asking because I want to understand where you're at, not to redirect you to a hotline and move on.

Regardless of your answer, what you're describing deserves to be taken seriously, not dismissed with "it'll get better" platitudes.

A few things I genuinely believe are worth saying:

Your skills aren't useless. Interactive Design + CS is actually one of the more resilient combinations right now, even with AI disruption. It's brutal right now, but "brutal" and "impossible" aren't the same thing.

The feeling of being forced into a life you didn't choose is one of the most suffocating feelings there is. That resentment is legitimate — not a sign something's wrong with you.

Helplessness in the face of systemic injustice is a real psychological weight that doesn't get talked about enough. It's not weakness. It's what happens when caring people can't find a lever to pull.

What would feel most useful to talk through right now — the career side, or the bigger feeling of being trapped?