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Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

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Re: Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

#811

Post by fivefive55 »

eps wrote: post #453
DamnInteresting wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In professional settings, when it comes to these kinds of awkward topics, I have found a method that has served me very well: A. Meet with the person who is applying the unwanted pressure (it works best one-on-one, so if more than one person is pressuring, you may need to figure out who is best to speak to). B. Frame your concern as asking for advice. For example, "I'm struggling with how to handle this on-call thing…

This requires the other person to see the need for the work-life balance. Some people genuinely don't. For some work is always the priority.

I see you've met my CTO.

Re: Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

#812

Post by uhhhhhhhh »

paulcole wrote: post #209
uhhhhhhhh wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will echo other comments and say that I enjoyed this post. IANAL, however, in all seriousness... I think you should talk to a personal lawyer about your situation ASAP, especially now that you posted this publicly. HIPAA is not to be trifled with and now you've shared that you have knowledge of a breach. You've also provided enough detail in this post that (if found and traced back to you) could be used as proof that…

HIPAA is absolutely to be trifled with. Look up who is actually fined and face actual consequences from HIPAA violations. It is 99.99% big universities, hospitals, and insurance companies. Everyone else gets (at most) a slap on the wrist and has to promise not to do it again. Once in a while they’ll fine a small family practitioner $25k for not shredding papers properly but it’s a total joke. HIPAA Compliance Service…

Do you know what the actual risk is here?

Personally, I wouldn't stake my future on hoping the government doesn't notice what my hypothetical law-breaking company is doing. Or that my law-breaking unethical CEO won't lie and try to throw me under the bus if/when the company eventually gets caught.

I'll restate that I recommend OP talk to a knowledgeable lawyer to get an informed assessment of what kind of risks he/she is undertaking.

Re: Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

#813

Post by sciurus »

rovr138 wrote: post #755
sciurus wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's simply not correct, at least in the US. The process I've seen is the employee is taken to a meeting room, they're told they've being let go, they're walked to their desk to retrieve their personal belongings, and they're walked out the door. From the employees perspective one minute they're working like normal, and perhaps a half-hour later they're standing outside unemployed.

I’ve seen this before. Get an email the day before to deactivates someone’s access at X time. Next day they get called into a meeting 10 mins before X and then escorted to their desk and out a couple mins after.

I've had similar experiences, where I'm told in the morning to be available to handle an account deactivation immediately at X time, and then at X time I'm given the name.

What really sucks is when you have to do it for one of your teammates. :-(

Re: Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

#814

Post by paulcole »

uhhhhhhhh wrote: post #812
paulcole wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HIPAA is absolutely to be trifled with. Look up who is actually fined and face actual consequences from HIPAA violations. It is 99.99% big universities, hospitals, and insurance companies. Everyone else gets (at most) a slap on the wrist and has to promise not to do it again. Once in a while they’ll fine a small family practitioner $25k for not shredding papers properly but it’s a total joke. HIPAA Compliance Service…

Do you know what the actual risk is here? Personally, I wouldn't stake my future on hoping the government doesn't notice what my hypothetical law-breaking company is doing. Or that my law-breaking unethical CEO won't lie and try to throw me under the bus if/when the company eventually gets caught. I'll restate that I recommend OP talk to a knowledgeable lawyer to get an informed assessment of what kind of risks he/sh…

I understand the difference between odds and risk. The risk is high (assuming you use the harshest possible penalties) but the odds are infinitesimally long.

Google and find who has actually faced penalties from HIPAA violations and what those penalties were. How many serious fines/prison sentences have been handed down? Who was at fault? Were they random no-name startups?

Re: Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

#815

Post by CodeMage »

ikRwS3Nb6Y wrote: post #800
CodeMage wrote: post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Treating PIP as a pink slip is toxic. It might have become acceptable, but it's still toxic. I've only been placed on a PIP once and it's my go-to story for explaining what a PIP should really be. I had just moved to United States with my wife and my 7-year old son. Since this was the second time I had moved from one country to another, I expected to be able to handle it reasonably well. Instead, I got seriously depr…

Disclaimer: current amazon sde I was shocked at the end of your story that it was Amazon you were talking about, but I'm assuming this story happened at least a few years ago. I know of one friend who was put on a PIP around 2013 or 2014 - he is still with the company, has been trusted to be the technical lead for several large and important projects, and the only thing standing between him and a promotion to L6 is l…

I'm really sad to hear that. For the record, my case was in 2013.

Re: Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

#816

Post by Random_Person »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #738
Random_Person wrote: post #658

That'd be great. I'm actively searching, but a 40 year old junior dev isn't in high demand. I took my present job hoping for some mentor-ship to better develop my skills. My days are spent in my office, with no concrete understanding of what is expected of me. I have projects that are "mine"... and by that, I mean that no other developer has a clue what I do. There is no team. No goals. No targets. I just work on wha…

Wow, this rings true for me. Slow days are depressing and fast days are anxious and frustrating, and on all days it's down to me, myself, and I to figure out what to do. I ameliorated this by getting a couple of mentors, they have diff projects but they know my workflow decently well so can guide me generally.

I have one person I go to regularly... he's in DevOps, doesn't know my code at all, but he's good at testing and being blunt. Often, my workdays are spent working on whatever criticism he levelled to me the day before.

Re: Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

#817

Post by yr1337 »

My limit was that after a decade of single-handedly spec'ing, programming, supporting and otherwise being in charge of all internal app development efforts for the $6 billion North-American arm of a $50 billion multinational corp... I still wasn't deemed worthy of the opportunity of a green card, or a salary commensurate with my responsibility and impact on the corp. The day I got my GC by other means and thus was no longer stuck working for them, I gave my 2 weeks, to everyone's surprise and disappointment! And that was with no jobs lined up after that.

Re: Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

#818

Post by yr1337 »

throwawaybeebs wrote: post #383

What really gets my goat... Working for a boss who's a dangerous cocktail of arrogance, incompetence, and is self-conscious of it. He's the kind of person who keeps a copy of Steve Jobs' biography and The Design of Everyday Things around his desk. If you ask him a yes-or-no question he responds with, well that depends . And if you ask him to clarify be prepared for a journey through tales of the south, hippie commune…

Sounds like your boss is in fact my insufferable neighbor who is a CTO and is word-for-word the guy in your description. I've stopped inviting him back and I think he finally got the memo. Tell him I didn't say hi.

Re: Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

#819

Post by gtirloni »

PeterStuer wrote: post #397

Side note: Over here employers must give you a notice of termination, the length of which depends on how long you worked for the company. For employees with over a decade of loyalty, this period can be a year or more. The intent is that a worker can get enough time to find a new employment. The regulation has a perverse effect. As an employee who is on notice is generally no longer trusted to prioritise the company's…

I have a similar situation here but not as extreme.

My thought is that this should encourage companies to fire fast. However, I see the opposite. Maybe it's the sink cost fallacy in effect.

Re: Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

#820

Post by bmarkovic »

crististm wrote: post #481
reificator wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My response: You've never looked at a piece of code that you wanted to see the history of? You've never needed to revert a single change a few hours/days/weeks later? You've never needed to track down the person who wrote a piece of code in order to ask them for clarification? You've never needed to see the original change reason for a line of code that is doing some weird, specific thing that seems out of place? You…

I've got these responses on a similar question: "we don't need to see the commit logs so who cares about them or the history being pretty and clear? Nobody is looking at the history!"!! The question was "Let's submit pull requests as a clean job not as a homework draft. Why don't we allow push force on work branches so that we can squash fixup commits after review?" Blows my mind that those are senior developers that…

There are valid reasons for a "never rewrite history" policy, but their validity pales further you go from the master branch.

The thing is that in a lot of scenarios people need to do huge chunks of work in feature branches. Sometimes a 3000 line "refactor the world" squashed commit is really unhelpful. The best policy is always well thought of weighted case-by-case decisions.

However, on projects with a lot of hands on the keyboard such policy is unrealistic and someone will do the opposite of what they should and wont ask or discuss. People, especially in our business, hide incompetence behind aloofness and silence.

So in that case, with a lot of people that are hard to manage, stiff policy is the best choice and there probably are reasons why people want to preserve history, no matter how hairy it looks, at least it's there and you can find stuff in it.

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