191–200 of 414 posts
> bankrolling your children’s insulin What an utter lack of self-awareness. You guys are some of the best compensated workers in the entire world. At least have some decency not to bring the "little girl who has cancer" into it.
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Because the threat of firing and the driving down of your self worth as a worker is core to (American style) capitalism. Your fear for your job or the prospect of having to find another one makes you take suboptimal economic positions, the arbitrage of which keeps the gears of capital spinning. We couldn’t have the workers collectively realizing their worth now, could we? The inmates would be running the asylum.
This narrative is counterfactual to how capitalism actually works. Your worth is determined by supply and demand. Investors would never agree to paying American developers twice as much as European developers if they knew they would be on the hook for them until their cash reserves bled dry.
Supply and demand works in a world with no information/power assymmetry in Econ 101, a.k.a. freshman's dream. Even in the most basic case, when a sack of flour is being bought and sold, the buyer wants to buy a sack of flour, the seller wants to sell a sack of flour + a variable number of bugs in it, and the seller's profit margin goes up with the number of bugs. That's why there is a third party necessary which fixes the maximum number of bugs to be included with a sack of flour: otherwise this whole "free market" falls apart or starts killing people.
Amazing. There was a time, nearly 20 years ago, that I was let go from Adobe. My colleagues assumed that because of my position/tenure/knowledge that I was layoff-proof. I told them that I was just a number in a large organization, and that orgs of a certain scale don’t do layoffs in a way that looks at each individual. Sure enough I was let go and after 16 years at the same company, that was acquired by Adobe where…
Though, there are always workarounds when managers want to keep their highest performers off the list.
Management needs to be made up of the sort of people who make economically optimum decisions. Without diminishing the horrible experience of being fired; if we have people who purposefully keep tens of thousands of people working on jobs that don't make sense to them, on aggregate society will be much worse for everyone. We have a system that allows people to do unpopular things, like this, because it works better th…
No it doesn't. It works better for 1% of the population. Everyone else is a health crisis away from bankruptcy. Literally. That's all it takes in the US for everyone who doesn't have an eight-figure-or-more net worth to be staring ruin in the face. Your comment is exactly the mythology that perpetuates the problem. Exploitation is sold as participation. "Well we're paid fairly well so I guess we must be privileged an…
But that's exactly why we have bankruptcy. You know the word doesn't mean "losing everything you have", it means "discharging debts you're never going to be able to pay", right? You can do it once, and it ruins your credit for a long time (7 years IIRC), but it saves you from dying of starvation trying to pay off debts you don't have money to pay.
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>Is it necessary to fire them? That's the relevant question we should ask ourselves. That's not the relevant question. The relevant questions are: were the layoffs illegal, and if they weren't, then why is it any of your business? If you don't want to live in that world, start your own startup, hire people, and never fire them. Nobody is stopping you.
> The relevant questions are: were the layoffs illegal, and if they weren't, then why is it any of your business? I think a more relevant question is: should the layoffs be illegal? Just because todays law says “tough luck” doesn’t mean it has always been, or will always be, that way, or that we can’t argue for something better.
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Because the people who decide exec salaries are execs in other businesses, so they generally have 1) An inflated view of the impact of execs compared to other employees. This is a well studied psychological phenomena. People tend to overestimate their "skill/contribution" even in poor luck or even rigged scenarios. (There was a study which gave some subjects a head start in monopoly, i.e. more money, the subjects ten…
This is a dishonest super one-dimensional analysis, borderline conspiracy theory, I'm disappointed to see it be the most upvoted.
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it would be nicer if they made economically optimal decisions in the first place, instead of making a bad decision in 2022, firing a shitload of people in 2023, and going "ah whoops our bad". competent operators wouldn't get into this problem in the first place (or, alternatively, these layoffs are also an incompetent decision and the C-levels are simply following the herd)
I have a feeling the current actions are economically optimal, and so, they’ll keep happening - if they optimisitcally hire a ton of people, then fire most of them, that’s expensive in the bad years - if they only hire as many people as they need, then they’ll be eaten by the bigger-risk-taking competition in the good years
In general, it’s better to keep people if you’re profitable even if you want the margin to be higher. Google’s problem is more their management – in a less rudderless environment you could come up with things for people to work on but when you’re mostly sitting around hoping the ad words money fountain keeps running it probably is true that you can’t figure out what to have them do.
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Says the person who lacks the ability to fire them. The reason why you don't have that ability is the same reason why you are seen as more replaceable.
> The reason why you don't have that ability And why is that?
Amazing. There was a time, nearly 20 years ago, that I was let go from Adobe. My colleagues assumed that because of my position/tenure/knowledge that I was layoff-proof. I told them that I was just a number in a large organization, and that orgs of a certain scale don’t do layoffs in a way that looks at each individual. Sure enough I was let go and after 16 years at the same company, that was acquired by Adobe where…
But isn't the inbetween contract jobs a tenuous time?
My process is that 60 days before the end of my current contract, whether my current client has said they intend to renew or not, I start seeking other contract opportunities. If my client finalizes the renewal, I halt my job search. If they don’t, the 60 day window has consistently been long enough to ensure I have my next client lined up before my current contract ends.
Most of my contracts are 12 months long. I don’t take contracts any shorter than 6 months.
I should note that I’m in Canada and so I don’t have to worry about healthcare coverage.
The Cinque Terre (Italian pronunciation: [ˈtʃiŋkwe ˈtɛrre]; Ligurian: Çinque Tære, meaning "Five Lands") is a coastal area within Liguria, in the northwest of Italy. It lies in the west of La Spezia Province, and comprises five villages: Monterosso al Mare, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola, and Riomaggiore. The coastline, the five villages, and the surrounding hillsides are all part of the Cinque Terre National Park, a…