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Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

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Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#24

CircleCI. Last week during covid crisis, all while announcing a $100m Series E round of financing, they let some employees go and did not offer any severance. Disorganized management, and with some teams, passive-aggressive management style. Would not recommend joining...

Crazy. They're advertising quite a lot on LinkedIn at the moment too. :(

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#25

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.

> 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).

That depends how many companies survive the six months. The good thing is it should reset things to a boom time in 5 to 10 years.

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#26

CircleCI. Last week during covid crisis, all while announcing a $100m Series E round of financing, they let some employees go and did not offer any severance. Disorganized management, and with some teams, passive-aggressive management style. Would not recommend joining...

How would you characterize the quality of CircleCI? I've spent quite a few hours trying to work out mysterious bugs in a build process that runs fine locally. This morning the web ui was full of 'client error' messages.

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#27
Can someone please change the title of this - just as with other similar posts - to use "laid-off" instead of "fired"? Regardless of how loose some may be with language, there's a clear distinction between these terms.

For example, my home state's Employment Security Department: https://esd.wa.gov/unemployment/laid-off-or-fired

Given that there are non-US readers here, maybe there's another pair of phrases that Hacker News could use as standard in this situation. I know in the UK, "made redundant" is used instead of "laid-off".

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#29

I’ve been checking layoffs.fyi every day and it is incredibly bleak

What I don't quite understand is why startups who either just received funding or companies who were doing reasonably well decide to do mass layoffs during economic downturns? I mean they provide $reasons but I have a hard time taking them at face value.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#30

I wish there was some kind of list for the UK. Our news services are shockingly bad.

Although lots of UK companies won't be making any redundancies until the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme ends. It's much easier to put UK workers on the 80% pay furlough scheme than firing them. As soon as that money dries up expect companies to make lots of mass redundancies. It's going to be interesting to see the UK government's exit strategy from this crisis, immediately terminating the scheme before the economy has recovered will result in a huge increase in unemployment but keeping the scheme means productivity won't recover as people able to work productively are sat at home doing nothing.
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