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Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

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Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#251

Post by speedgoose »

chrisseaton wrote: post #228
speedgoose wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

You cannot be fired if you protest in a reasonable way yes. Disclosing or destroying customer data is not acceptable no. I'm not a law expert so I cannot tell you were the line is. I guess nobody really knows precisely.

Kidnapping is for sure not acceptable. Stripping the clothes as well, it was very criticized everywhere in the world including France when the AirFrance HR cunt got his shirt destroyed. If you work in France in the future, don't be scared about being kidnapped by your co-workers. It's very unlikely, especially if you are not a bad CEO, and I don't remember physical harm happening. I'm not saying it's acceptable, but it's a very small risk and you should not dismiss the benefits of protesting for only a few protests that went wrong over the last 10 years.

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#252

Post by DonHopkins »

nemo44x wrote: post #190
McMini wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did the site show?

Companies that were fucked, as their name documents. Got their start in the heyday of the .com crash as domino after domino fell and many companies were exposed for the unviable company’s they were. The site took great joy in documenting (mocking) companies that were once tall and proud and quickly collapsed.

I always wondered if fuckedcompany.com had back-door access to the Internet Confessional database.

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#253

Post by altacc »

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…

Having done budgeting for hiring employees in the UK, for small and medium sized companies, the factors that went into calculating staff costs never included any severance or redundancy factors. Paying redundancy is relatively rare, so doesn't need allocated funding until you're in that process.

When you're employing people you're not already thinking about their future exit. You hire based on your growth, so you're usually optimistic about the future and thinking about employees being long term. If not you hire contractors, who you can lay off easily.

Part of this is that you can't just fire people without good cause and without following a process. There are probationary periods to allow the hire to be let go if they don't work out in the first 6 months or so, but after that you're into a long "managing them out of the business" process that may or may not end up with a pay off.

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#254

Post by lvoudour »

sneak wrote: post #188
omginternets wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic, all contracts are violations of consent. You'll forgive us for not being convinced by your argument.

I’m not sure I follow that logic. Written, signed contracts where the agreeing parties are not being coerced is presently our gold standard for opt-in consent.

> Consent can be withdrawn at any time, with no further obligations or liability. That’s key in a free society.

I'm sorry but there's plenty of both liabilities and obligations in the event of early termination. Have a look at your telco contract if you don't believe me

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#255

Post by beilabs »

sylvinus wrote: post #63
jmchuster wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've seen great results since switching from Circle to Buildkite, not the least of which is cost, but you have to be willing to do a little bit of your own IT work.

I second Buildkite, one of the best choices we made at my previous company.

Another happy Buildkite customer here. Beautiful UI and it just works really well.

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#256

Post by growlist »

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.

Whether the European social model is sustainable is another question. There are plenty of apparently reasonable economists that argue it is not.

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#257

Post by squiggleblaz »

catchmilk wrote: post #160
acruns wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are the technical person on the sales team. They do demo's, field technical questions, might do a POC with a potential customer, so on. They also get a commission but they traditionally have a standard salary as well instead of the sales rep where their salary might be 60% or more commission only.

So.. not an engineer.

When was the last time a person with the title engineer was an actual engineer? Even software engineers are usually just programmers, sometimes senior sometimes not. Hence my question.

I think you can usually tell what someone is not by looking at their job title. The last word tells you what they're not (except for those management positions where they do it backwards and say "vice president communications" - in those cases any parsable subcomponent of the name tells you what they are not; a vp comms can neither communicate nor are they a vp).

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#258

Post by Aeolun »

balfirevic wrote: post #247
CraigJPerry wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think you can use raw salary in that comparison, it ignores cost of living differences

It doesn't matter, the difference is not enough, and the developer in SF is still much better off.

The developer in SF might be financially better off, but the developer in Berlin is better off in general.

Re: Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

#259

Post by growlist »

wickerman wrote: post #237
alinde wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an idea if they chose to quit because they expect finding new jobs is easy right now, or any other aspect?

I don't know about other sides of IT, but as a data engineer in London I'm getting daily messages from recruiters offering contract/permanent positions. All the big companies are also hiring. So if you have a certain level of seniority I can imagine it's easier to land a new job now.

Yeah there's loads of work around from what I've seen.
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