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Ask HN: Who is firing?

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Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knew the HN SV crowd would find a way to spin this as "This is good for "

For the record, I am neither employed in or near Silicon Valley (not that it should matter), nor do I have any strong beliefs about whether or not actively weeding out developers is a good tactic for a business (five years ago I would have said it wasn't, now I'm agnostic). Whatever my beliefs or situation though, it's not hard for anyone to understand how a medium-to-large scale organization with a high hiring bar c…

If I had a dollar for every time someone said "why don't we hire like Google does"?

Answer: Google can do what they do because of their scale, culture, systems, access to pots of money etc.

Google are Google. The rest of us are not and can't calibrate our hiring process to turn up only false negatives. We'd never hire anyone.

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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…

In Australia that's generally called "special projects".

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a place, where I was not laid off, but my friend was, on his birthday. For me, this was a real eye-opener. It would not have been a big deal for HR to wait another day, and then lay him off. Another employee, also laid off, 2 days after moving out of his aunt's house and had put a deposit down on an apartment and DSL connection. I think I left a month later right before the company imploded.

Happened to a friend of mine while he was on his honeymoon. Through a slip by management people knew it was coming. He wanted to know before he left, but they wouldn't tell him. So he ended up checking his voicemail everyday while he was on his final vacation.

Happened to a colleague of mine while he was on leave after the birth of his first child.

He was allowed to come into the office one weekend (escorted by security) to collect his things.

Welcome to fatherhood.

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#394
post #356

Before posting, double check your severance agreement. It's common to have a non-disparagement (no bad mouthing) clause in it.

Can true statements be disparagement?

This is a really good question. It seems a non-disparagement clause waives one's right to the first amendment.

http://www.jaburgwilk.com/news-publications/what-is-a-non-di...

Is this right?

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative to making it impossible to fire people, is to make getting fired less of a big deal. Instead of adding friction to the employment market, implement a decent social safety net that includes provisions for voc ed / retraining. Instead of focusing solely on prevention, work on mitigation. To much prevention can make everything grind to a halt.

> Instead of adding friction to the employment market, implement a decent social safety net that includes provisions for voc ed / retraining. Sure, except that nobody wants to do that for some abstract reason of "fairness", so the problem needs to be mitigated another way.

Really? I thought it was that it smells a bit too much like communism.

Which seems to be gradually becoming less of a problem over time, even here in the USA.

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is how it happens: You're applying at a bunch of places, some of them being internal referrals from friends of yours. After a while you notice that all of your job applications are fizzling out, so, frustrated, you start asking for feedback (especially since a friend of yours kept getting rejected for talking about SOA instead of RESTful APIs). The answers you get aren't helpful, like "we just felt that you were…

Cue people spouting how it's illegal for you to record a conversation.

I suppose one could sidestep it by requesting permission to record for "review with the rest of the hiring team." Probably not a good idea, though.

Confronting them on the phone is probably a worse idea, though.

Realistically, though, if you're job hunting, filing lawsuits might not be the best use of time.

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#398
post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can true statements be disparagement?

This is a really good question. It seems a non-disparagement clause waives one's right to the first amendment. http://www.jaburgwilk.com/news-publications/what-is-a-non-di... Is this right?

Whenever I had to sign one after a lay-off I checked with lawyer friends first. They are not really enforceable.

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#399

The company where I work has been going through problems and for the past few months people keep being let go. After 4 months of watching an average of 2 people loose their jobs per month, I had the idea to register dayssincelastlayoff.com. My idea was to have a 'X Days Since Last Injury' kind of image on the site that would just show this stat for various companies. My thinking was that knowing how frequently a comp…

This happened at my prior job which ambush fired me back in February. I noticed that their main investors had started to back out of tech investments in general, and then heard about several rounds of layoffs since then. Friends told me about a morale drop, but they are also friends, and might have been trying to soften the blow.

Anyhow, I like your idea for dayssincelastlayoff.com.

Re: Ask HN: Who is firing?

#400
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The creator of said site posts on HN from time to time, under pud . https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pud

Pud is Phil Kaplan. He made a few bucks on AdBright, got married and still hacks up wild ideas that mostly whiff. Plays the drums.

Can only assume this is sarcasm or some definition of "whiff" I don't know. He's had FC, AdBright, TinyLetter and DistroKid - wish I had a track record that strong with my projects!
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