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Ask HN: Who is firing?

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Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#161
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to elaborate?

Berlin startups are infamous for hiring foreigners from countries with low salaries, ideally from outside of EU (so no free movement of workers with Germany) and paying them below the market salary. Low pay + dealing with German bureaucracy + sky rocketing prices of everything in Berlin = person has a problem. As for Axel Springer - their understanding of internet innovation is quite... "skewed". e.g. as some kind of…

Makes sense, thank you

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the difference between being fired and laid off?

In the UK, "getting fired" or "getting the sack" means you were incompetent (or commited misconduct) and are sent home. For incompentance, they can only do this after a "performance review" (they have to give you 3 months to improve, I think). "Laid off" is called being "made redundant". The company can do this much more easily to a bunch of people, but it generally has to pay them ~6 months salary and can't hire new…

You don't get 6 months salary, that's never been a thing. Unless there's something different in your contract, it's a week per year worked. A normal contract clause in the UK is that it's a month or 6 weeks notice both ways after a probationary period of 3 or 6 months, so that's usually a minimum.

https://www.gov.uk/redundant-your-rights/redundancy-pay

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot about being 'sent to Coventry' - i.e. the company doesn't want to pay you redundancy, and can't fire you for incompetence, so you get ignored, not given any work, get put in a useless role, etc until you wise up and quit/find another job. British passive aggressiveness at its finest! Being American. I would have had no problem with being fired aka 'you're now surplus' and it would have been far more helpfu…

Sent to Coventry appears to be Constructive Dismissal under UK law https://www.gov.uk/dismissal/unfair-and-constructive-dismiss... Of course it might not be worth the lawsuit.

It's almost always worth the lawsuit, it's cheaper for a company to pay an employee off than fight them in court.

The actual numbers of people who take abusive companies to court is low, just look up the statistics of companies who constructively dismiss women after pregnancies, compared to the number who actually get sued.

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#164
Serenova (prev known as LiveOps Cloud) closes their Bay Area and Auckland (New Zealand) offices later this month after running them down for the last year.

Positions moved to Austin, Fredrickton (Canada) and outsourced. By coincidence the CTO lives in Fredrickton and the CEO lives in Austin.

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#165
post #109

Shopstyle in SF just laid off 20 staffers between dev and product.

I heard that was directly due to development team deciding to rewrite their site in "the angular" because it was quote: "like Haskell but better" Blew a huge hole in their search engine rankings.

How did rewriting the site in another language affect their ranking?

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#166
post #157

There is a big german gamecompany that hasn't paid 300+ employees in 4 months so they are bleeding employees instead of firing them.

Gameforge?

GF already fired ~100 people a few days ago: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-10-25-layoffs-str...

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#169

When I read this, all I could picture was the scene in HBO's 'Silicon Valley' where Gavin Belson sacks his entire Nucleus team, then later inadvertently hires them all back again when he acquires EndFrame, and doesn't realise that he is talking to the same people in the same room about the same product.

argh, spoilers :(

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#170
post #167

There is a big german gamecompany that hasn't paid 300+ employees in 4 months so they are bleeding employees instead of firing them.

Hamburg, I guess... ?

Could be, I know alot of developers here who work for GoodGames and InnoGames. I think GG did a batch of firings semi-recently but I don't recall hearing about anybody not being paid. Then again I'm not German so I miss out on some news.
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