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Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

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Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#481

Post by Nasrudith »

jyriand wrote: post #272
fest wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, as I surely thought they will be one of the companies benefiting the lockdown.

I think it's because most of their fleet of robots was focused on serving campuses.

That sounds consistent - before the radioactive mutant black swan of Covid they would make the most sense to serve as lowest risk of robot mugging and would need less battery endurance which is expensive and when done wrong attracts headlines as your bots catch fire in the streets - regardless of who is at fault there is no way to not look incredibly incompetent when your product immolates like that.

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#482

Post by nemo1618 »

davnicwil wrote: post #273
frenchman99 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that looks so practical ! And no server cost/setup/maintenance, I guess. 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 ?

Great question! Firstly, and very importantly, the agent is open source ( https://github.com/boxci/boxci ) so you can see exactly what it does and even build it from source if you want. I should mention Box CI isn't launched yet, everything is still in beta including the agent. The Box CI service doesn't have any way to send requests to or send commands to agents - the requests are one-way, agent to service only, wit…

Neat! I love the model of giving powerful CI tools directly to the user. I ended up with a similar solution for my personal projects: a private bors-style CI GitHub bot, written from scratch, running on my own hardware, that I control via GitHub comments (the bot ignores comments from other users).

It's quite spartan, but it gets the job done, and I love that a) it's fast, b) I can see exactly what happened, down to ssh'ing into the build directory and poking around, and c) If there's a feature I want, I can just add it!

Here's my bot in action: https://github.com/lukechampine/us/pull/37#issuecomment-5936...

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#483

Post by gofreddygo »

raghava wrote: post #245
bsanr2 wrote: post #39

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.

This is also the time that th underprivileged would get exploited more. Work permit/visa holders will see an increase in workload (with a "work-more-or-eff-off" note, along with possibly a paycut too) Even pay negotiations on open offers, making it seem generous tha offer doesn't get cancelled. Personally know a couple of friends who are in the US (with H1Bs awaitng transfer/extensions) facing this particular situati…

throwaway account for obvious reasons.

Work permit workers (H1, OPT and L1-B in increasing order) are the worst exploited and least privileged sub group of the entire tech workforce.

Be it an upcoming economy with a flood of opportunities like we saw for the past 7 years or a downturn, like the one we are witnessing now, visa workers will be exploited no matter what.

They are not cheaper than non visa-dependent hires, but they are abundant, easy to hire, easy to fire, easy to replace, incredibly easy to bully, pressurize and basically exploit. The only barrier to total exploitation is the manager's own conscience and values. And we all know, values are easily compromised when it can help the bottom line.

Working on a visa in USA is fucked.

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#484

Post by RandomBacon »

danharaj wrote: post #462
RandomBacon wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

0x8BADF00D, one of your comments was flagged, probably because you used an obscure English word that people usually assume is racist, but is in fact not. Though your tone isn't helping you. Everyone else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_n...

Everyone is aware of the pedantic point you're trying to make and understood what that poster was trying to do.

I wasn't trying to make a point, and I don't have an opinion on California's taxes one way or the other. Please assume like the HN guidelines state, that I'm only trying to help everyone regardless of their views.

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#485

Post by Nasrudith »

chx wrote: post #37
PaulRobinson wrote: post #6

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.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28772108 > Did the Great Recession affect mortality rates in the metropolitan United States? Effects on mortality by age, gender and cause of death. > Our finding that all-cause mortality decreased during the Great Recession is consistent with previous studies. And yes some specific mortality like cancer did increase because of the broken -- profit based -- health care system. But…

Of course ironically prosperity can be more dangerous dirtectly as risky "vices" like extreme sports and fast cars are expensive. The Kennedies tend to die doing activities restricted to or done far more often by the privledged.

Extreme sports may technically have a long term boost on life expextancy (from fitness) but short term would make a spike in accident deaths. I guess money is sort of the same way - better outcomes from affording healthcare but the temptation to take risks results in more immediate deaths.

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#486

Post by cannaceo »

e40 wrote: post #454
nunez wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The exec isn't wrong. You don't turn down free money if it's available, especially if you can use it to help build the business. There are plenty of businesses in /r/smallbusiness or /r/startups talking about doing exactly this. Now, if they used it to buy a new McLaren or something like that, then, yeah, they're a piece of shit.

If they are audited and can't show impact by COVID19, then there might be fines. Big ones. I just signed the loan app for my 36 yr old software company which has been hit by a drop-off in sales.

I didn't see proving harm by COVID19 as a requirement for applying for the loan. The loan is to minimize unemployment claims. Without the loan I would've been looking to make proactive staff cuts immediately despite not being dramatically impacted by COVID19. With the loan I feel comfortable keeping my workforce employed. My understanding is the requirement to not pay back the loan is that you keep 75% of your staff employed but we will see what the SBA and banks require as part of their loan forgiveness criteria.

Another thing to note here is that despite not being harmed directly by COVID19 we are all suffering the indirect harm. Consumers are broke, supply chains are disrupted, air freight cost is sky high, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#487

Post by FridgeSeal »

ssfivy wrote: post #265
squiggleblaz wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an Australian living in Europe. What's it actually like there? It sounds like you're under strict lockdown but everyone seems to be saying the government is doing a terrible job (even though the test positive rate is low and the relative number of cases, even the absolute number of cases, is low). Here you say the economy is still humming along but other people say there's queues outside of Centrelink and down th…

Australian in Sydney here. Most retail shops are closed. A lot of restaurants and cafes are closed. All events cancelled. So there's a lot of casuals / partimers who don't have any work anymore. Bunnings, BigW, Kmart, all supermarkets are open with social distancing and limiting people in the store. Not sure a bout bike stores. Hobbyco in QVB is still open. A lot of stores closed their retail but are still doing onli…

> Not sure a bout bike stores

Open and doing roaring business from what I can tell. Took my mountain bike to get serviced and my mechanic said he’s far busier than he anticipated and it’d be over a week before he could even get to my bike.

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#488

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

aivatra wrote: post #404

FIRST FACTORY (company link: https://firstfactory.com/ ) Hello fellow HN readers. Here's the short version of the story: So I was working at X SF startup company (with a subsidiary office in Costa Rica) and decided to give it a try at First Factory, an outsourcing shop based in NY and Costa Rica, they handed me a contract (March 5th, 2020) to start working with them effective March 30th, 2020. So I quit my job and wa…

Contact your former employer... and see if they want you back. Tell them the new place isn't as fun as you thought.

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#489

Post by daguar »

aivatra wrote: post #404

FIRST FACTORY (company link: https://firstfactory.com/ ) Hello fellow HN readers. Here's the short version of the story: So I was working at X SF startup company (with a subsidiary office in Costa Rica) and decided to give it a try at First Factory, an outsourcing shop based in NY and Costa Rica, they handed me a contract (March 5th, 2020) to start working with them effective March 30th, 2020. So I quit my job and wa…

I'm really sorry to hear that. It's unclear to me if you're in Costa Rica, but heads up if you're in the US your situation likely qualifies you for the new unemployment benefits (Pandemic Unemployment Assistance.)

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#490

Post by nobleach »

ngngngng wrote: post #392

Several Utah startups have had layoffs due to COVID, not sure about the numbers for most of these though. Rainfocus Domo: 10% of workforce Vivint Smart Home HireVue Divvy employees have been told that layoffs are inevitable. No whispers yet of layoffs at the two Ycombinator startups in the state (Weave and Podium)

Add Nav to that list.
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