241–250 of 339 posts
Wow, that sounds so poorly handled. Not figuring out a way to tell everyone affected at (nearly) the same time is probably the worst sin. Best layoff I ever went through was when my boss came to our team and said, "look, don't tell anyone, but we have a layoff coming in a few days. I have to let one of the three of you go. Do you want me to decide or do you want to decide amongst yourselves?". She knew we were good f…
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sure let’s replace a daily life sustaining activity with a celebratory product total disconnection and bastardization of the point of the phrase rare level of yuck here
Why did we (as an industry) go with “eat your dog food” instead of just “eat your own food”? I find the former disgusting each time I hear it.
I was actually surprised to read that the Swedish CEO "took a dab at unions". Sure, relationships with unions can be complicated, but I've never heard an employer talk negatively about them here (maybe I'm just sheltered?). I am used to seeing union reps come to the office a few times a year for Q&As and feedback sessions, and taking about union membership was normal in internal channels. Never heard of anyone in lea…
Should be noted that employment in Sweden is as far from “at will” as you can get. There is basically no legal difference between a union worker at a paper mill and a software developer at a startup (once it reaches a certain size). The law basically says that the last one in must be first out, and sidestepping this order requires negotiating severance with unions (yes also for white collar tech workers). So if you n…
The article makes it sound like this is a suggestion, not a requirement, for layoffs
> The culture of “we are awesome” has dominated most internal communications for the last couple of years, including in 2022. We all believed that we were awesome and would continue growing and winning. This is the big thing that drives me nuts . I don't know if it's a fragility of ego thing or what the cause may be, but it results in a corporate inability to critically self-evaluate at the highest levels. If you can…
The HR director wrote “why it is a great time to work at X part 1” and then we did some layoffs… and part 2 was sent out the next day without missing a beat.
That company eventually stumbled and failed largely because they wouldn’t cancel a product that was clearly deficient (a far superior product was available but wasn’t invented by the established engineering manager, so they killed that product instead ).
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Fwiw there is a more normalized practice that resembles this and is, afaik, not a massive hr risk: openly offering a voluntary severance with defined benefits. Obviously it's not a great signal to those who don't take it about the health of the company, and you might lose a bunch of people you'd rather not, but I think allowing some level of self-selection is good when it's possible.
I find it rather rare that a relatively compentent dev couldn't get approximately equal compensation working for some other company. So if offered $X for volutary severance, where $X at least N months total compensation, most devs who can get a similar job in less than N months will leave. This leaves you with least capable people, which is (usually) not what's wanted when doing layoffs. (This is of course assuming t…
I was actually surprised to read that the Swedish CEO "took a dab at unions". Sure, relationships with unions can be complicated, but I've never heard an employer talk negatively about them here (maybe I'm just sheltered?). I am used to seeing union reps come to the office a few times a year for Q&As and feedback sessions, and taking about union membership was normal in internal channels. Never heard of anyone in lea…
From my experience, it's not very common in tech companies in Sweden. They often lack collective agreements and in the last company I worked at I never heard anyone talk about it or say they were a member.
Edit: Was curious to find some numbers about this. I don't read Swedish fluently yet so having to use Google Translate, but one report I found from 2020 says that "Information and communication" (which I suspect IT/software engineering might fall into) has 69% membership [0]. It seems to say white collar workers actually have a higher membership rate than others at >70% overall; will look some more and add any other numbers I can find.
[0] - (page 13) https://www.lo.se/home/lo/res.nsf/vRes/lo_fakta_136602747878...
> The culture of “we are awesome” has dominated most internal communications for the last couple of years, including in 2022. We all believed that we were awesome and would continue growing and winning. This is the big thing that drives me nuts . I don't know if it's a fragility of ego thing or what the cause may be, but it results in a corporate inability to critically self-evaluate at the highest levels. If you can…
> The self congratulatory back-patting HN is guilty of this constantly. Everyone who posts here is implicitly in the right and users unequivocally back that attitude, even when it realistically is a scenario of "maybe you were a shit employee and were fired for it and your employer isnt in the wrong?" or "your Show HN really isn't that impressive". We're not allowed to say anything critical of other HN users without…
These things absolutely can be said on HN, if you list some points that make you think so. If OTOH your comment ist literally just that one sentence then I don't see why it shouldn't get downvoted and flagged. This is not the YouTube comment section.
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all businesses are risky. that's why we have capitalism and there are bunch of people who are willing to take the risk and rewarded for taking that risk
Rewarded for luring people into consumption loan debt? Great system.
A 55 year old is the most productive member of a society, but that is also the age where you start to consume very little.
Imagine if you had to 'save' to get your college education, your home, a laptop, or starting a business. There is a reason we don't ask babies to 'pay up' for milk or shelter.
Imagine if Larry Page or Sergey Brin had to work and save to start Google.
Imagine if government had to save trillions of dollars before investing in Carbon Capture and renewable energy generations.
Yes, all good things can be abused. But you can't prevent good things for 95% society because a 5% of the society abuses it
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1-3% of the transaction volume. That percentage is the 1.4 billion Klarna takes as revenue. The margins of that can be very high.
Are we sure that that's true? As a private company klarna can choose any metric they so desire as revenue...