71–80 of 253 posts
As a silver lining, because we’ve normalized firing, we’ve also normalized jumping ship frequently. Get hikes and save up during good times, skill dev/change course during the recessions. But tbh it’d be better if things didn’t swing so much.
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After the probation you need a really good reason and it costs a lot of money / paperwork / worker's right etc.
Absolutely not true in Denmark. A good reason can be something like "we are eliminating this position for strategic reasons", and the only money it will cost you is the three-six months (depending on how long they've been at the company) that you have to keep paying them, during which they are required to work as normal and act loyally.
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The premise of it being irreversible is wrong and far more complex. Case study. In my country, most individuals do benefit from a severance on a permanent contract. Getting a permanent contract happens after working for a year if you're lucky or in a high demand job. In other cases, companies will use their power to stall as long as possible where beneficial. Temporary contracts do not have the same severance benefit…
We shouldn't normalise pushing people to quit via bullying of course. But bullying and bad benefits result from a company/employee mismatch, which changing jobs fixes easily
For the majority of countries, your entire point rests on the premise individuals are choosing to largely be immobile. Tenure length isn't that different from the US, all things concerned. Significant, especially given some countries, but not nearly as dramatic as "impossible to fire".
The moment you introduce mobility, most of the safety is gone for a large portion of time. What we are seeing, is that younger people are hit disproportionately since job hopping tends to be the far better choice, and younger people do not start at incomes that get them comfortable. It is primarily the elderly that benefit from the current structure.
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I have been in Europe for a few years now and my experiance is significantly opposite of what the parent comment claims.
That doesn't really make logical sense to me. Can you elaborate? If hiring is an irreversible decision for a company, why wouldn't consideration be required prior to any hire?
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That doesn't really make logical sense to me. Can you elaborate? If hiring is an irreversible decision for a company, why wouldn't consideration be required prior to any hire?
The premise of it being irreversible is wrong and far more complex. Case study. In my country, most individuals do benefit from a severance on a permanent contract. Getting a permanent contract happens after working for a year if you're lucky or in a high demand job. In other cases, companies will use their power to stall as long as possible where beneficial. Temporary contracts do not have the same severance benefit…
But I’ll be the devil’s advocate and present the harsh reality:
How is firing, in the USA, not the actual normal to begin with?
As a college senior in Computer Science in 2002-2003, my many classmates had jobs lined up in Oct 2002, ready for graduation and work summer 2003. The tech company stocks were flying high, but all of a sudden, in a month, all those companies had cut entire departments. Hearing the news, a lot of friends that thought they had “secured” a job, called those companies and almost all of them were in limbo - those cut departments didn’t even return the calls to say “sorry, entire dept. was cut, start looking again”.
My parents generation was used to the “gold watch retirement philosophy”, stick w/one company for 50 years and they will take care of you. That reality shattered for them during the 2008 GFC. They had worked for 20 years at the same company, but faced with layoffs and cuts, they no longer really knew how to interview and learn new skills. As a result, my dad “retired” at 55, always looking but never finding that next job. Luckily, they were in early tech (AT&T), and mom found contracting roles to service the legacy tech they worked on during full employment. The lesson here was that - don’t let those skills and interview skills rot. Being at one place for 20years and specializing can seem like “security”, but actually was a curse after the shock.
And here we are now, after ~14 years of relative stability, time to flex those survival instincts, don’t rest on the past comforts.
"We have normalised firing of people." We spent decades in the US smashing unions, smashing pensions (replacing them with more volatile instruments like 401Ks) and made at-will employment dangerous for both sides of the equation. Firing has been trivialized for decades. This is not new, and the current wave is minuscule compared to 2008, 2000, and previous. The worst is yet to come.
Why would an employee in the tech sector prefer an employer-managed pension? A 401(k) usually allows me to choose what I invest my money in (including bonds), and can be rolled over to a new employer easily. And it’s my money once it’s in my account, not my employer’s money. They can’t require me to work for a certain period of time to get it out, and don’t pay me less to compensate for offering the retirement benefi…
I’m not super well informed on what his options were; I’m sure he had different retirement benefits via staying with GE post-merger, but if anyone is interested I could get more details.
EDIT: Based on memory and what kind of work he did, I’m almost certain it was this item in the “General Electric timeline” Wikipedia page: “GE Aerospace Division sold to Martin Marietta, now Lockheed Martin”
(That doesn't mean I support layoffs in the slightest, just that I'm bothered by that line)
It’s not all bad. Having firing as an option in the US makes it palatable for employers to take risks, like hiring the non traditional student, or the person without any industry experience. If at-will employment wasn’t available, companies would react by only hiring when absolutely necessary, and there would be fewer available jobs. Plus, even in the US, some companies offer pensions and are known for almost never l…
You don't need fully at-will employment for that. But I do agree with your overall point. If it was literally impossible to fire anyone - rather than just quite difficult - then interviews would be insane. Probation would last years.
I'm glad tech companies have very simple interview procedures at the moment.
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Why would an employee in the tech sector prefer an employer-managed pension? A 401(k) usually allows me to choose what I invest my money in (including bonds), and can be rolled over to a new employer easily. And it’s my money once it’s in my account, not my employer’s money. They can’t require me to work for a certain period of time to get it out, and don’t pay me less to compensate for offering the retirement benefi…
That is a pension. In the UK they're called Self Invested Personal Pension and basically all companies do them now. But I agree they pretty much only have upsides - no risk of the pension fund going bankrupt (would be good right about now in the UK!) and no way for previous generations to steal from the current one, which is basically what all defined benefit pensions are doing now.
To think of that as "stealing" seems pretty individualistic and short-sighted to me. What benefits would the current generation have to give future generations a future if everything that matters is how much you save and do in the now? This line of thinking leads to financial decisions that value the present much more than they do the future and it's in big part a reason why we are in deep waters when it comes to climate change.
Of course, I agree that it is important to reward people personally as well. But I think it's much more important that we are building sustainable societies capable of taking care of people all through out their life cycles and that improvements on productivity impact us all because, after all, we all live together. But I guess that's just my personal vision of what a good society should be; for others, as you say, they would rather live in a dog-eat-dog world because they know they would be top dogs.