Ask HN: Who Is Firing? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#221

Post by Silhouette » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 11:11 AM UTC

tomduncalf wrote: post #202

Silhouette wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under UK employment laws, you can't just force your staff to take a 20% pay cut without their consent, even if you're using the furlough scheme. And as others have pointed out, it may have been more than 20% in practice, if it was based on the furlough scheme where a cap applies. A lot of places that are genuinely up against it because of the virus are asking staff to take that hit voluntarily to help protect the bus…

>Curiously, just yesterday the UK government announced some new measures aimed directly at supporting startups, particularly tech startups in their early stages that aren't yet making money Do you have a link about this please? Hadn't heard of it until now

I'm not sure the full details have been published yet. It was mentioned in the usual round of news reports last night, so I assume it was announced as part of one of the set pieces yesterday.

It sounds like some sort of investment-matching scheme, where the existing investors have to put more money in to keep the business viable but the government will then make some sort of contribution as well.

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#222

Post by chrisseaton » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 11:11 AM UTC

speedgoose wrote: post #183

chrisseaton wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how other employees could trust an employee abusing their privileges like that, either.

It's fine if it's a common decision among active employees.

I don't think that's fine at all - seems a terribly unethical thing to do and completely indefensible.

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#223

Post by crazycapitlists » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 11:11 AM UTC

onychomys wrote: post #136

Hospitals are having a surprisingly tough time of things. I work for a very famous hospital in a small town in the American midwest, and we've (our IT department, that is) laid off all our contractors and the rest of us have mandatory furloughs coming up too. They're doing everything they can to not let us go, but some of us will probably end up getting sacked. And this is maybe the richest and most well-connected ho…

[flagged]

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#224

Post by onedognight » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 11:12 AM UTC

tcard wrote: post #192

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprisingly, severance is also mandatory in Argentina and many other "under development" countries. I'm absolutely amazed at how people in the US are so against severance being mandatory.

Other things equal, if companies need to pay severance, employees get paid less each month, because companies need to take into account expected severance costs in their total labor costs and there's less money left for other benefits. So all employees effectively pay for layoffs, which goes against you if you're not the one that gets laid off. (I am very much in favor of mandatory severance and generally other kinds…

> So all employees effectively pay for layoffs, which goes against you if you're not the one that gets laid off.

Or you could say that the company needs to save the profit generated by your position until it equals your anticipated severance before paying dividends from that profit. So it’s still a drag on profits, but it has nothing to do with other employees.

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#225

Post by somishere » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 11:12 AM UTC

akdor1154 wrote: post #139

ratww wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is good news, considering they've apparently been also able to reduce the number of new confirmed cases [1]. [1] https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/

Yep. social gatherings / hospitality industry / gyms etc are banned, and anyone who can work from home is doing so, but you still can leave your house for "essential reasons", e.g. exercise, buying takeaway lunch every day. many retail stores and public transport are still functioning. I think it's our - low density - government actually listening to scientists and reacting quickly and non-ideologically.

low density yes. tho would argue each politician is finger-dancing to the beat of their own belly-gurgles. not quite trump/cuomo levels of disfunction, but trendy-curves aside, messaging here definitely lacks some cohesion.

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#226

Post by sarakayakomzin » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 11:12 AM UTC

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #165

gigatexal wrote: post #79

No severance?! I, as an expat, am absolutely grateful and have changed my tune on the “European welfare state” trope to “this just makes sense”. I got let go from a Berlin based fintech and got 3 months pay plus a small severance. They did this likely because funding fell apart during the pandemic but it could have also been to cull people that they didn’t need but they did do right by us.

> No severance?! I agree that no severance sucks. Although keep in mind that in theory, higher salaries should equal hire savings. The average developer in SF makes more than the average developer in Berlin (how much more... maybe 2X)? If you could make 100% more & forego a severance package, would you? It's not a real world choice, I'm just trying to offer context that one way to look at higher salaries is that you…

>higher salaries should equal hire savings

as does not having to pay out of pocket for unavoidable medical expenses. why should I be tethered to an employer who pays me less money but gets a better discount on insurance due to their massive size? "somehow" the bigger a corporation gets, more government subsidies get thrown at them, which in turn get used to subsidize the cost of employees and further get used as leverage for insurance pricing?

> If you could make 100% more & forego a severance package, would you

for a company I've never worked for? I would have to be stupid to do so. You have no idea what the culture or ethic of the team looks like, and you're willing to not care for only 100%? I wish I had that kind of free time.

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#227

Post by fest » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 11:14 AM UTC

jyriand wrote: post #154

Estonian startup Starship Technologies(robot delivery service) has laid off lot of people. How many is unclear. As I understand they try to stay afloat by using their robots for pizza deliveries now. https://news.err.ee/1070009/starship-technologies-makes-redu...

Interesting, as I surely thought they will be one of the companies benefiting the lockdown.

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#228

Post by chrisseaton » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 11:14 AM UTC

speedgoose wrote: post #176

chrisseaton wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you guys could perhaps put a firewall rule to drop all incoming traffic to the VPN How could you ever trust an employee who did this with their access privileges?

Hurting the company is the point of this kind of protests, but you shouldn't do it alone with your company credentials for sure. Some employers may want to fire the people who organize the protests, but in France the employees representatives are more protected than others and you can't fire them easily. It has pros and cons.

How protected is this kind of direct action? If it's ok to disrupt the company's services is it also ok to disclose or destroy customer data? Where does the law draw the line?

I've heard about workers in France literally kidnapping and stripping the clothes from their bosses and it being tolerated. I think that kind of thing is never tolerable under any civil circumstance. If a co-worker tried to kidnap me I'd see that as a threat to my life and I'd be fighting for survival.

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#229

Post by Silhouette » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 11:14 AM UTC

pinkfoot wrote: post #198

Silhouette wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claiming someone is redundant and then hiring someone else to do essentially the same job, but on worse terms and probably with a different job title or other deceptions to try to disguise what you're really doing, is a trick as old as the sun. UK employment lawyers and tribunals are likely to laugh you out of the building with an expensive lesson if you try it.

Noone does that. What large companies do is hold a large minority stake in their group companies. Then they shut down the 'programme' in one company and move it, modulo some cosmetic changes, to another group company. Bitter experience.

Indeed. Larger businesses in the UK do have additional obligations when it comes to redundancies, but the system isn't perfect, for sure.

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#230

Post by DonHopkins » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 11:14 AM UTC

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #217

danesparza wrote: post #119

God this brings back memories of fuckedcompany.com Right after September 11th, that site got very popular among engineers like me -- seeing (on a daily basis) which company bloodbath was next. It was kind of fun, until it was our company.

PBS did a story on them but couldn't say Fucked Company on their broadcasts so they used the name "The Dot Com Deadpool" instead.

Fucked Company published an excellent documentary on the Digital Entertainment Network.

(It's from "Fucked Company", so obviously it's NOT SAFE FOR WORK, but who's at work any more these days?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmaRTZpJgPA

>Dot Com Boom & Bust - Digital Entertainment Network

>A parody of the founders of Digital Entertainment Network. DEN was "a quintessential example of the excesses and lack of control of the dot-com craze."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Entertainment_Network

>I rescued this from Web Archive, and it was originally posted on the Fuckedcompany.com website, which went defunct in 2007.

Yes, THAT guy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6iDZspbRMg&t=19m42s

>Cryptocurrencies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company

Oh no :(, the Internet Archive fucked them:

https://web.archive.org/web/2/http://www.fuckedcompany.com/

>Sorry.

>This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.

Alternative archive of the front page, at least:

https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20060603194832/http://www...