That is pretty ridiculous. When I was laid off, I was given 2 months of full salary upfront. Of course, CA raped me on the taxes, but that's a discussion for another time.
Ask HN: Who Is Firing?
381–390 of 593 posts
Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
In form, it was a pretty simple discussion site. But it had a lot of insider info and an enormous amount of snark, and it really captured the spirit of the popping of Bubble 1.0 (and the post 9/11 downturn). I remember one where a CEO made a big deal about the tech staff working through the holidays to finish vital new products. And then the CEO went on vacation to Hawai'i, leaving the nerds to grind it out. The memo…
I remember a suggestion to place all startups in a death pool which they were only allowed to leave if they managed not to buy any Aeron chairs (those were all the rage at that time) after one year in business. I loved that idea.
My company was featured in a story on Herman Miller, where we spent more on Chairs then we had in revenue for the entire 24 months of our existence.
Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
In form, it was a pretty simple discussion site. But it had a lot of insider info and an enormous amount of snark, and it really captured the spirit of the popping of Bubble 1.0 (and the post 9/11 downturn). I remember one where a CEO made a big deal about the tech staff working through the holidays to finish vital new products. And then the CEO went on vacation to Hawai'i, leaving the nerds to grind it out. The memo…
I remember a suggestion to place all startups in a death pool which they were only allowed to leave if they managed not to buy any Aeron chairs (those were all the rage at that time) after one year in business. I loved that idea.
I am currently sitting in an Aeron chair from one of the dot com bust furniture auctions...
I had a friend who rescued servers just abandoned in their racks when one company just folded mid-day, the last remaining guy just walked out of the office.
Crazy times.
Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is looking 2001-dot-com-crash bad, but much, much faster. Also probably much more transient, no? Is there a reason to think this trend would continue beyond say... six months? (or whenever quarantine measures are mostly relaxed).
The Netherlands tested for antibodies in blood donor serum last week, preliminary result is that 3% of people have them. And not all of them show full immunity. If we relax quarantine measures, the virus just comes back immediately. This is going to stay with us for years.
> And not all of them show full immunity.
Where did you get that number? This seems more like propaganda than scientific claim.
Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?
#385Hospitals are having a surprisingly tough time of things. I work for a very famous hospital in a small town in the American midwest, and we've (our IT department, that is) laid off all our contractors and the rest of us have mandatory furloughs coming up too. They're doing everything they can to not let us go, but some of us will probably end up getting sacked. And this is maybe the richest and most well-connected ho…
Aren't they going to end up over-burdened soon, at least in some departments, due to all of the deferred surgeries and the like?
Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't get government unemployment benefits in the UK if you have >16k in savings (i.e. most programmers, presumably)
>You don't get government unemployment benefits in the UK if you have >16k in savings This isn't true. You'll get new style JSA for 6 months [1] pending you have contributed NI for the past 2/3 years which almost all will have. https://www.gov.uk/jobseekers-allowance/eligibility You're talking about universal credit which yes you won't qualify for with greater than 16k savings (pension savings or HTB ISA are however…
How much are unemployment benefits worth in the UK? Like if you are a programmer, what percent of monthly salary would be the unemployment benefits?
Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?
#387This post needs some positivity! The Wikimedia Foundation is still hiring many of the same positions we were before all of this. You can see the currently-open positions at: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/jobs/ They've been an outstanding employer during these difficult times, as announced publicly on our blog: https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2020/03/06/wikimedia-fo... Come help us bring free knowledge to…
This is entirely off topic given the question was the exact opposite of this, keep it to the "Who is hiring" thread.
Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?
#388Not naming the company, but I know of a startup that's got a round of $10M (not much but enough) who just applied for relief because their burn rate is $200K+ a month. They have no customers, have been in the red for 2 years and have been slowly building their product out -- like most early funded startups -- they are building potential without revenue (yet).
Their theory is, get some free money and treat it like 6 months of salary to help and take it as a "gift".
When I cited that they "weren't directly affected by this and could keep going until this COVID thing ended and it wouldn't matter to them." The person I know who's involved at the exec level said, "It's free money, when you get a free bag of money, you don't turn away on that..."
I wanted to throw up.
Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
For-profit hospitals are a stain on the American healthcare system. I worked for one of these facilities years ago, and elective surgery was the only thing the administrators cared about.
Just out of curiosity, is your comment about "for-profit hospitals" a non sequitur? Your parent comment refers to the Mayo Clinic, which is neither "for-profit" nor "a stain on the American healthcare system".
My parent comment does not mention Mayo Clinic. I'm mainly talking about hospitals that operate only for profit.
Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
We've seen great results since switching from Circle to Buildkite, not the least of which is cost, but you have to be willing to do a little bit of your own IT work.
But isn't that the point of Circle...not having to do any IT work? At some point the cost of Circle becomes negligible, especially when you consider how much your time is worth...and that you don't have to do any maintenance.
Yes, if you are completely allergic to IT work, then your options are more limited. In terms of time, I would say the initial setup cost us a day or two, but after that our EC2 build box has just been fire and forget.
edit: I'll also add that in terms of time, I feel like most of the time in build pipelines is actually spent in tweaking, adding, and modifying the build configs, as opposed to the servers themselves (and you might also value developer time differently from devops time). I have found Buildkite easier to work with than CircleCI in this regard, and thus saved much more time overall.