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Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?

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Re: Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?

#231

Post by djmips »

Rantenki wrote: post #203
eat wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The more you contribute, the more you sacrifice by joining a coop. The less you contribute, the more you gain. You could say the same thing to describe working for any corporation.

Any corporation which fails to extract more value from it's employees than it pays them doesn't stay in business for long. But yes, you are absolutely correct, and the value added by a productive developer is probably vastly larger than the value added by the rest of the rank and file. That's why developer centric startups can grow so large, so quickly. Still need the rank and file to take care of pesky things like s…

Unless they are in a monopoly position in a lucrative business.

Re: Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?

#232

Post by pastacacioepepe »

zug_zug wrote: post #223
flat-pluto wrote: post #4

Blind[1] is a decent community to get a glimpse into what employees truly feel about employers, get referrals and overall tech career advice. It can get rather toxic and troll-ey at times, but you can filter that out to focus on the useful stuff. [1] - https://www.teamblind.com/

I'll go ahead and defend blind. It's absolutely negative to the extreme, but it gave me the heads up on a layoff and has all sorts of relevant information. I've come to realize I (we?) trust companies so little that many people would never even complain in a private direct message to a coworker -- pretty hard to commiserate if you're remote. Most coworkers I know refuse to fill out any "how happy are you at work?" su…

> I've come to realize I (we?) trust companies so little that many people would never even complain in a private direct message to a coworker

We claim to live in democracies, while in fact we spend good part of our adult life in parallel societies where we can't even express dissent in private.

Re: Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?

#234

Post by _2uwr »

whatshisface wrote: post #169
moremetadata wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But are they ethically or morally correct clauses to have in a contract? I know lawyers let you put WTF into business contracts because its a business to business contract anything goes, but business to human contracts are different and this is what amazes me about the ethical nature of lawyers & law firms knowing some of those lawyers will go on to become judges of all things. Been There, Seen it, Done it!

I think you can find a lot of unreasonable ones out there, but at its core the idea of not taking a company's trade secrets to a competitor is a reasonable thing to agree on. It turns into a bad thing when companies abuse their bargaining power to stop you from working on totally unrelated projects in your personal time, or when they stop people from practicing their profession for a period of time after they part wa…

> at its core the idea of not taking a company's trade secrets to a competitor is a reasonable thing to agree on

But its ok to pay poor wages and let staff go, using the law as a weapon? Isnt that anti capitalist? Isnt that against the spirit of the law?

>with people who know how to negotiate

Rather the employment is not so one sided, the employee has to take everything dished out to them.

>you see a lot of contracts where you get paid your full salary for say a year to sit at home and do nothing,

You also see people put on gardening leave where the contract contains nothing to handle certain situations.

Re: Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?

#235

Post by eldritch_4ier »

zeptonaut22 wrote: post #7

The closest thing to gathering I've seen is the consistency of posting on LinkedIn with the #layoffs and #opentowork tags. I've also seen a decent amount of activity in the ex-Googler community where former Google leaders (e.g. Laszlo Block, former head of HR) host Zoom discussions about what life's like on the outside and whatnot.

"what's life like on the outside" haha. It blows my mind how disconnected some people in tech are.

Re: Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?

#236

Post by rnk »

dajtxx wrote: post #162
twblalock wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like quite a lot of guilds and unions, the actor's guild started out by defending workers rights against a restrictive system (in that case, the Hollywood studio system) but has evolved into a gatekeeping and rent-seeking organization that primarily enriches its senior members and hurts everyone else. We really, really don't want that in tech. Tech is one of the few segments of the economy where skill trumps credenti…

Skill trumping credentials and connections has not been my experience in a 35 year career. The gatekeeping by recruiters and HR departments is extreme - until I got my CS degree a couple of years ago I could not get interviews anywhere, despite the fact I'd never been sacked from a job and was always one of the best coders in my teams with the broadest range of experience. I lucked out many years ago on getting an in…

I humbly disagree with some aspects of your comment. I think software engineers are highly paid, almost the lowest paid devs in the country are decently paid. Companies are just looking for a simple filter and a degree is an easy one. With my degree I actually did learn theory and did learn to program in several languages and did learn how to work in groups. But that's not universally true of course. And there's plenty of self-taught people. I have known a few people who got started without a degree as engineers doing software and it was really hard until they had an extensive resume. After they have a resume it doesn't matter. I just see it as a lazy, easy filter. The reason I don't see us as fitters and turners is because there's so much demand for our resources and you can become wealthy. My wife has a master's degree in library science and this isn't open to her. She's national board certified and I probably started out at more than she'll ever make.

Re: Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?

#237

Post by elamje »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #14

It just occurred to me that so many people were laid off, we could start the world's largest software co-op (and arguably one of the largest tech orgs, period). We could build software products that every industry needs, that every worker owns a part of and can vote on org-wide decisions. Literally everyone you need was laid off... Tech people, business people, marketing, sales, etc. We just need a forum and some vol…

I think this is an interesting idea, but the reality is that most people want jobs, not a new model for how to make a living. In tech, or startups, or interesting problem spaces.

Right now, the biggest problem is discovery, i.e. who is still hiring vs who just has stale jobs listed on their website. I'm working on making this list so it's much easier to discover the (literally thousands of Seed to Series B companies still hiring!)

See companies that are hiring: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OeuaamkeOpMzlufPk6hY...

If anyone is struggling and is on the mid/senior/director side of their career (3+ yrs), I'm helping place people at my friends' Seed and Series A companies. VC money is still there but pumping into Seed/Series A companies with more upside now rather than insane B, C, D companies that have no profitability in sight. email me at j{at}markovmanagement.com if interested :)

Re: Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?

#238

Post by peruvian »

fergie wrote: post #34

Related question: are any actual software engineers getting laid off or is it just support/admin/management who work in the tech sector? (I have been dealing with consulting contracts for software engineers lately, and was surprised to see that hourly rates are significantly higher than they were 5 years ago)

Half the Engineering team at my company got laid off.

Re: Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?

#239

Post by Panzer04 »

asdff wrote: post #88
chitowneats wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the best engineers I've ever worked don't even have a bachelor's degree. These autodidacts will suffer greatly if the wrong kind of "software guild" gains control over licensing tech employees.

SAG doesn't require a degree in screen acting. It's a little convoluted but they basically operate mainly on proof of work. That sort of system would probably give self taught engineers who spent their years from 18-22 doing actual work a huge leg up compared to those who were in school during that time doing no work on any projects for any company.

You don't think school has any value? There's a reason we have higher education - Work-based learning is somewhat prone to leaving significant gaps in a person's knowledge.

Not to say working has no value, but neither does schooling have no value.

Re: Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?

#240

Post by huhtenberg »

hankish wrote: post #156
throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #14

It just occurred to me that so many people were laid off, we could start the world's largest software co-op (and arguably one of the largest tech orgs, period). We could build software products that every industry needs, that every worker owns a part of and can vote on org-wide decisions. Literally everyone you need was laid off... Tech people, business people, marketing, sales, etc. We just need a forum and some vol…

What a brilliant idea! Me and a bunch of other folks have been working for the last 18 months to create just such a professional collective, with the goal of expanding it massively. Lots of laid off workers are joining and everything is cooperatively-managed, self-organizing and transparent. It's a combination of a professional network, a full service consultancy, a skills academy, and a startup incubator. We've got…

To be very blunt - do you not have a concern that companies tend to shed less skilled, under-performing and generally not terribly useful employees first?

We had the same idea after the .com bust, though at a somewhat smaller scale. In our case however everyone got laid off. The startup I was in burned through its money, failed to raise more and was closed down by the VCs. All developers and several project managers then gathered for beers and decided to start what you have - a co-op of sorts. The idea was that everyone would fish around for gigs and share them with others, under a (naive) assumption that some people would get more than they could handle, e.g. the PMs.

Sounded good in theory, but in practice just two devs out of 20 were qualified enough to bid on projects that paid enough. The rest just kept sitting things out. Two months in, the whole thing fell apart.

Ultimately, the incentives are just not there. If there are two people of different professional levels, there's no reason for a more skilled one to associate themselves with another person. So the dynamics of the co-op is that it keeps shedding most qualified people, making it less and less competitive. If you managed to figure out this aspect - chapeau. But it's an extremely hard nut to crack.

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