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Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

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Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#41

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...

Guess they might just be using Covid as an excuse to get rid of some people? Wouldn't be ethical, but wouldn't be surprised if some companies took advantage of the situation.

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#42
post #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.

As an end user I've been pretty happy with it. I've used Jenkins, Travis, Github and Circle mostly, and of those I hope to never have to use Travis or Jenkins again, and I've only really used Github for some simple stuff, but rather enjoyed the experience.

Circle however I've used with some fairly lengthy and complex build processes involving multiple parallel builds of Rails apps during upgrades and it's handled the workflow well.

I think they've improved the UI a bit recently, but it's still pretty complex though.

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#43
post #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 Hacke…

Someone's got a great deal of solidarity I see,

Solidarity with people being laid-off, yes. I was laid-off recently. Not fired. I did nothing wrong.

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#45
post #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. :(

I wouldn't be surprised if this was a method of rotating staff to reduce salary spending.

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#46

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…

Keeping the scheme is also going to blow a massive hole in the budget. That said, Brexit will likely give them more room to fire up the pound printing presses to paper over the gap.

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#47

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…

> but keeping the scheme means productivity won't recover as people able to work productively are sat at home doing nothing.

Productivity will recover when businesses can use resources productively. It's either keep the scheme running until quarantine measures are reduced enough to allow businesses to start ramping back up and productivity increases again, or remove the scheme and push people to unemployment which is worse for productivity. If the government is daft enough to stop the scheme before the quarantine measures are reduced we're in for a shit-show of a decade.

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#48

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

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.

Although I enjoyed the film I found this article more interesting as a story, and more useful as a soource of information too:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2010/04/wall-street-excerpt-...

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#50

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.

If you just raised 18 months of cash you might find it prudent today to cut burn by 30% to turn that into 24 months of runway.
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