231–240 of 593 posts
In some companies it feels like they are firing the people that they could not easily get rid of otherwise - cutting of the bottom 25% of staff (based on low performance reviews or personal grudges).
Makes a lot more sense than firing the high performers, no?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Statistically-speaking, this will disproportionately effect women and minorities (low performance reviews !necessarily= low performance when implicit bias is present, which again, statistically-speaking, it is). Certainly these times suck for everyone, but there go the careers of black, brown, and female millennials with yet another black mark on their CVs before they've hit their 40s.
I'm sorry but I (as a minority myself) genuinely feel a little bit insulted by your assumption that minorities score worst in performance test. There's no basis for that belief, a part from your personal biases and they are shockingly regressive even if well intentioned. Are you yourself a minority?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would you characterize the quality of CircleCI? I've spent quite a few hours trying to work out mysterious bugs in a build process that runs fine locally. This morning the web ui was full of 'client error' messages.
You might be interested in what I'm building over at https://boxci.dev The motivation for this was exactly this problem. With Box CI your local build is your CI build because it runs jobs via agents on your own hardware so you can very easily debug / understand what is going on.
The thing I'm concerned about that doesn't seem addressed on your home page is security : by installing your agent on my machine, I'm basically giving you access to my machine non-stop, no ? What guarantees do I have that your agent can't be used as a backdoor ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surprisingly, severance is also mandatory in Argentina and many other "under development" countries. I'm absolutely amazed at how people in the US are so against severance being mandatory.
interesting... what if mandatory severance and other (supposedly) nice things are the reason those countries are underdeveloped?
Hint: they do.
Bird, just in case you haven't seen (heard) it: https://youtu.be/wxTYKCOnRe4
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surprisingly, severance is also mandatory in Argentina and many other "under development" countries. I'm absolutely amazed at how people in the US are so against severance being mandatory.
Other things equal, if companies need to pay severance, employees get paid less each month, because companies need to take into account expected severance costs in their total labor costs and there's less money left for other benefits. So all employees effectively pay for layoffs, which goes against you if you're not the one that gets laid off. (I am very much in favor of mandatory severance and generally other kinds…
Sounds like a very acceptable compromise. I'm happy to chip in. I'm also happy that I pay taxes for universal healthcare so that I can take advantage of that when I'm in a disadvantaged position, but that's me.
a quote i remembered from twitter: "This is the best time to get rid of employees". a startup based in London just fired 10% of their workforce. all were given two options: government's furlough scheme where the state pays 80% of the salary, or outright dismissal. interestingly, half chose to quit.
Do you have an idea if they chose to quit because they expect finding new jobs is easy right now, or any other aspect?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is looking 2001-dot-com-crash bad, but much, much faster. It's worth remembering there are plenty of companies not laying people off, and "normal" will return eventually. That said, I was watching The Big Short yesterday, and a line that I had noted before haunted me even more: "For every 1% unemployment goes up [in the USA], 40,000 people die". Stay safe, stay positive.
Things might be different now in ways that now have a different impact, but if you want to feel better, there's evidence that the Great Depression did not cause an increase in people dying[1]. > Population health did not decline and indeed generally improved during the 4 years of the Great Depression, 1930–1933, with mortality decreasing for almost all ages, and life expectancy increasing by several years in males, f…
I think this is mainly fearmongering by the upper 0.1% seeing that now they might have to bear the "risk" they are always claiming to shoulder when taking in enormous returns on their capital... (e.g. in Germany currently most car-companies (BMW and VW are both largely family-owned) still pay their dividends, while their employees are getting unemployment benefits from the state...).
In the end history tells us, that people generally seem to prefer to stay alive however low the odds are. If this has significantly changed in the last 50 years, maybe we should think about what has changed that – I seriously doubt that a "let's go back to business" is the right approach in that case.
God this brings back memories of fuckedcompany.com Right after September 11th, that site got very popular among engineers like me -- seeing (on a daily basis) which company bloodbath was next. It was kind of fun, until it was our company.
Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM?
A: IBM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleida_Labs
https://web.archive.org/web/19970617084520/http://www.suck.c...
For Goldhaber and Braun, we
recall the line of Guildenstern
in coming out the losers in a
game of princes and kings from
Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead: "There
must have been a moment, at the
beginning, where we could have
said - no."