Tyler Le/Insider
Early in the pandemic, Bryan Roque lost his job as a software engineer at Amazon. Part of him was relieved. He'd been working himself to the bone for months on end, and he felt completely burned out. But the timing was tough: The company was dumping him into the worst job market since the Great Depression.
Roque called his parents to give them the bad news, then packed up his apartment and moved back in with them. He eventually found a new job, a position at IBM that was fully remote, but an underlying anxiety stayed with him. "It just felt like I had no control," he told me. "I didn't like that I was under the whims of a company that gets to decide whether I'm employed or not."