Before I was laid off, like most people, I believed the myth of meritocracy: do the right things, work hard, accumulate experience, and job security will follow. Five months and twenty days after the layoff, having sent out over a thousand resumes on BOSS Zhipin — most sinking without a trace — I picked up Ofer Sharone’s The Stigma Trap (《污名陷阱》) and finally realized: I’m not looking for a job; I’m struggling inside a trap that was designed. As long as you’re on the path of selling your labor or your time for pay, inside the system you are always consumable material, never talent. For consumables, think about it this way: when your computer gets old, do you keep enduring its lag and blue screens, or do you sell it as scrap secondhand and buy the latest model? Companies handle hiring the same way for consumables. It’s cruel, but it’s the fact. So-called irreplaceability is actually very hard to achieve — the positions and SOPs the system designs exist precisely to demand replaceability. So every person is just a screw inside the system, swappable at any time; that’s determined by the underlying logic of industrial society. It doesn’t need geniuses; it only needs labor that is obedient, useful, cheap, and replaceable at any moment.
1. From “Outstanding Employee” to “Eliminated”: My True Story of 271 Forced-Ranking Cuts
When it comes to my layoff, many former colleagues found it surprising. One ex-colleague had quit earlier to go home and sit for the civil service exam; when he learned I’d been laid off, he seemed genuinely shocked — with your skills, even you got cut? Sounds like xx company is really done for.
For my first 3 years, I was the “2” in the 271 performance system — Outstanding Employee three years running, top performance ratings, stable project delivery. I never led a formal team, but I did lead dotted-line teams and produced standout results. Back then, I truly believed this evaluation system was fair: what you put in is what you get.
The change came in year three, when company performance declined (mainly due to management’s bad decisions, but ultimately the pot lands on the workers below — mass layoffs cut headcount from nearly 4,000 to just over 1,500). My +2 and +3 were cut; the entire line’s leadership was replaced wholesale; my +1 and I were transferred, and then I was moved to another department again. After the new department head took office, the “new emperor, new courtiers” script played right on schedule. The business line I was responsible for was, by my own feeling, marginalized; I gradually went from “core of the team” to “the guy who keeps the lights on.” My rating fell from “2” to “7,” and then stayed a stable “7” for two years running.
But I didn’t lie flat. I kept doing the work; whatever was mine to own, I still owned and still took on. Yet I could clearly feel I was no longer valued — picked apart on every detail, PUA’d, deliberately frozen out, probably in the hope I’d leave on my own.
The company’s overall performance kept sliding. The “7” I got wasn’t because I wasn’t good enough — it was because everyone was on a sinking ship, and the 271 system requires a bottom tier. That has always been this company’s consistent strategy.
In nearly 6 years at this company I was moved around several times. The role I was hired into — key-account technical support — got cut entirely; because I’d been transferred, I dodged the first layoff round. Then came several more reorganizations (anyway, regardless of performance, every quarter there were cuts, every quarter people left). Finally, at the end of 2025, my name was on the list. I know why: I’m 35, my salary was the highest on the team apart from the supervisor, and the new leader preferred to use “his own people” and give “his own people” the chances. After N rounds of layoffs, this once “Outstanding Employee” became the number that got sacrificed.
2. The Paradox of the 271 System: Do the Work, Take the Blame
After the layoff I kept thinking: where exactly does this system go wrong?
Reading the passage in The Stigma Trap about Jack Welch, I finally understood it completely:
The new-era rock-star leader — GE CEO Jack Welch — became a hero of Wall Street through periodic layoffs (whether or not the company was profitable). American capitalism thereafter “went its own stubborn way,” never looking back. After taking the helm of General Electric (GE) in 1981, Welch rolled out the famous Vitality Curve — rank-and-yank in its modern sense: employees forcibly divided into 20% top, 70% adequate, and 10% bottom, and regardless of whether the company was profitable, the bottom 10% had to be eliminated every year
The 271 rank-and-yank system essentially packages systemic problems as personal failure.
Botched company strategy, industry downturns, shrinking markets — these are all systemic problems. But through forced ranking, it turns directly into “you’re not good enough, so you’re cut.”
What’s even more inhuman: 271 is an internal relative ranking, not a measure of absolute personal contribution.
Company performance collapsed; everyone was sliding. Falling from “top 2” to “middling 7” wasn’t because I slacked off or my ability declined. But to enforce this forced-elimination rule, the company had to grab someone to be the “1.”
So I — the oldest and highest-paid — got grabbed and eliminated. After all, I alone could be swapped for two fresh graduates.
Only after the layoff did the system’s second venomous feature reveal itself: the stigmatization of unemployment.
Once you’re laid off, the outside world and the company both assume by default — you performed badly, you got a 7, you deserved it. No one will admit: the company’s performance was rotten, and it had to find someone to cut.
As Sharone writes in the book:
Stigma individualizes the challenge of unemployment, making it the unemployed person’s personal problem rather than a social problem.
The company’s fault, in the end, became my “inadequacy.” The laid-off are forced to pay for capital’s mistakes.
3. Unemployment Itself Becomes a “Stain”
Entering the job market wearing this “inadequate” label, I finally understood what Sharone means by the “stigma trap.”
One core argument in the book sent a chill down my spine: unemployment is not a neutral state but a stigmatized label.
Sharone writes that when recruiters see a long-term unemployed candidate, a question surfaces in their minds: “Why hasn’t anyone else hired him?” This isn’t malicious speculation — it’s an unconscious screening mechanism. When the pile of resumes far exceeds what a recruiter can seriously evaluate, they rely on “red flags” — and “unemployed for over 6 months” is the most glaring one.
I feel this deeply. A former colleague of mine was laid off last year and still hasn’t found work more than a year later. I’m not even at half a year yet.
In my first month after the layoff, I stayed optimistic — hiking, exercising, relaxing. I have over a decade of work experience, I’ve been part of multiple zero-to-one projects, my tech stack isn’t outdated, and I know the latest AI technology and keep updating my knowledge base. I figured this was just a temporary adjustment period.
In the second month, some anxiety set in, but I still believed in my fit; it happened to be around Chinese New Year, so I figured I’d search after the holiday.
In the third month, interview invitations were few and far between. I started reviewing my resume, polishing my talking points, adjusting my salary expectations. There were interviews, even salary negotiations, but the offers couldn’t even match my previous pay — either I turned them down, or they fell through over salary and they turned me down.
In the fourth month, anxiety turned into bewilderment: “What exactly is wrong with me?”
In the fifth month, the bewilderment began to sour — I started doubting myself. Am I really no good anymore? Has the market rendered my abilities obsolete?
Sharone calls this psychological state “the internalization of stigma.” When the outside world repeatedly defines you by “unemployment,” you gradually accept the definition and begin attacking yourself with the same logic. This self-attack isn’t weakness — it’s human nature: when the same signal (no one responds) repeats a thousand times, it’s very hard not to read it as a negation of your own worth.
4. The Paradox of 35: Overqualified and Underqualified at Once
If unemployment is the “stain,” then 35 is the magnifying glass.
The book describes a bitterly ironic phenomenon: older job seekers (in the American context, 50+ — but in China this age line is cruelly pulled forward to 35) face an inverted meritocracy.
What does that mean?
Applying for roles matching your former level, you’re deemed “overqualified” — “You used to be a tech lead; why would you come do ordinary development here? You’ll never be satisfied, and you won’t stay long.”
Applying for relatively lower-level roles, you’re deemed “too old, poor value for money” — “We want to hire young people who can work overtime and ask for less.”
I’m stuck in exactly this crack.
Apply to senior roles, and they worry I’ll ask too much and be “unmanageable”; apply to ordinary roles, and they dislike my age — “not young and energetic enough.” In one interview, the HR person put it very tactfully: “Your experience is rich, but this position might be a better fit for someone earlier in their career.”
Translated, that means: you have too much experience — so much we don’t know what to do with you.
One job seeker’s words in the book stuck with me: “Hiring a fresh graduate is far more cost-effective than hiring someone with years of experience.”
This isn’t personal failure; it’s the cold arithmetic of economic rationality. In that arithmetic, 35 means higher salary expectations, a more mature sense of time (unwillingness to work meaningless overtime), and workplace experience that’s harder to “hoodwink” — and in today’s hiring environment, those aren’t advantages; they’re “flaws.”
5. Networking for a Job: Like a Beggar and a Used-Car Salesman at Once
Sharone interviewed countless unemployed people for the book and found a universal emotional predicament: building a network is an excruciating process for the unemployed.
It’s not that I can’t socialize. At my previous company I was one of the most popular people on the team. But “networking for the purpose of finding a job” is entirely different — it forces you into the position of “receiving charity,” explaining over and over “why I’m unemployed,” “what kind of job I’m looking for,” “can you help me?”
The book mentions an experiment: researchers reached out to alumni asking for job referrals. When “unemployment” wasn’t mentioned, alumni responded warmly; once “I’ve been unemployed for a while” came up, the other side’s warmth “cooled instantly, replaced by suspicion and hesitation.”
This suspicion isn’t malicious; it springs from meritocracy’s deep-seated belief: success reflects worth; unemployment reflects deficiency.
I’ve asked friends for referrals; I’ve attended a few industry meetups. Every time it’s a tightrope walk between “being sincere” and “not making people awkward.” You can’t seem too eager — that looks “pitiful”; you can’t seem too down either, because “negative emotions are read as a warning sign of inadequacy.”
Sharone calls this the secondary injury of the “stigma trap”: you are stigmatized for being unemployed, and then stigmatized further for the dejection that the stigma produces.
6. It’s Not Your Fault — Even Though That Sentence Doesn’t Help Much
That sentence was actually said to me by my former +2, who had been laid off earlier, to comfort me when he learned I was leaving — telling me not to look for the cause in myself.
Finishing the whole book brought me more relief — not because I found a “way out,” but because it confirmed one thing: my predicament isn’t a question of personal ability; it’s the personal manifestation of a systemic problem. And a systemic problem can’t be solved by an individual alone.
Sharone cites a cruel piece of data in the book: in America, even when the economy improves and unemployment falls, the situation of the long-term unemployed actually gets worse — because recruiters wonder: “The economy is booming now, so why haven’t you found a job yet?”
The logic behind this: market outcomes are wrongly interpreted as outcomes of personal ability. A person can’t find work not because his industry is contracting, not because he happened to hit a company layoff, not because his age cohort is systematically excluded — but because “something’s wrong with him.”
In China’s workplace this logic is performed even more nakedly. The 35 age cutoff, 996 culture, the “graduation” euphemism — they all point to the same fact: workers here aren’t people; they’re consumables. Once a consumable passes its “best-before date,” elimination is “normal,” and complaining means you “can’t adapt to the market.”
Knowing this doesn’t make job hunting any easier. But at least it stopped me from attacking myself.
There’s a sentence in the book I copied into my notebook:
“Unemployed job seekers need to understand that unemployment is not a personal failing; although this won’t directly get them a job, reducing self-blame helps improve their mental health and job-search resilience.”
Job-search resilience — that term is far more useful than “positive energy.” It doesn’t ask you to fake optimism; it’s about protecting your psychological energy amid continuous rejection, and reframing “I failed” as “this one didn’t match.”
Written on day 5 months and 20 days of unemployment; today the subsistence allowance landed in my account.
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