X ordered to pay €550k to Irish employee fired after yes-or-resign ultimatum • Hacker News Board

Re: X ordered to pay €550k to Irish employee fired after yes-or-resign ultimatum

#371

Post by fargle » Sat, Aug 17, 2024, 7:16 PM UTC

no_wizard wrote: post #342

fargle wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> are employees actually at the level of indentured servants (which I would expect to be a contract between TWO parties) no, it's actually the polar opposite of that. either party is free to end the relationship at any time. there is essentially what is a long term contract (may not be called a contract), but one which either of the two parties can terminate. it's halfway between being a european style employee and b…

An interesting facet of a universal healthcare system is how much it could increase competition due to relieving healthcare costs for SMBs and for manufacturing industries like automotive by removing their healthcare obligations. You actually net increase the ability of people to work for themselves. Healthcare is often cited as one of the primarily reasons people don’t take the step to found their own business. Not…

this is a good point. there really used to be two major items that were part of this asymmetric leverage. one of them, retirement plans, have started to disappear, and that's a good thing.

- as you mentioned health insurance (and to some extent life insurance, cheap when young, but not so cheap as you get older)

- retirement. this seems to be steadily changing to 401K type schemes. the 85 point (age + years of service = 85) pensions are solidly in the rear view mirror, and i for one, applaud that. you can take your 401K where-ever you want and decide for yourself what age and how much money you need.

but i have other problems with "universal" health care though; the VA has something like this and it's not better. must it be that way? maybe not, but is it likely be that way? yeah...

then you have the free-rider problem vs. basic human rights. i'd just be happy if everybody could purchase the same insurance at the same price employed or not if they wished to do so. it's not quite there yet, although i have received quotes from Kaiser in CA for equivalent individual policies are that are nearly the same price to what just my parole deduction portion is from $$big$$corp - not counting their ~40-50% portion. which implies, as usual, big companies are being not very efficient. billing is a disaster; why is my insurance charged $50,000 for something i can buy out-of-pocket for $5,000? patents and drug companies are a disaster; problem: drugs are too expensive - solution: give artificial monopolies...

so what we've done so far in this country manages is a half-measure that manages to be worse than what we had before and just as bad or worse than some ideal universal health care would be. i acknowledge that health care is a thorny problem, nothing seems to be a good answer and we're highly unlikely to be fixing it (by fix, i mean make it better, not just doing more stupid stuff).

Re: X ordered to pay €550k to Irish employee fired after yes-or-resign ultimatum

#372

Post by tadfisher » Sat, Aug 17, 2024, 7:17 PM UTC

chii wrote: post #312

WrongAssumption wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlimited vacation was actually pioneered in the U.S., and spread from there. Most famously popularized by Netflix in its early days, but popular in law firms before that. https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/nq2ph2/i_r...

It's not actually unlimited. In fact, by not providing a fixed amount, and calling it unlimited, it lets managers put peer pressure onto people into taking less vacations than if they'd made a fixed amount!

Where I work we call it "minimum vacation", so you're required to take at least that number of days off, but you can request as much as you like over that.

Re: X ordered to pay €550k to Irish employee fired after yes-or-resign ultimatum

#373

Post by wkat4242 » Sat, Aug 17, 2024, 7:25 PM UTC

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #358

wkat4242 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the "at will" employment. It's terrible. I could never deal with that. I'm really glad for all our social protections here and it's worth the money. Also socialized healthcare <3

Bear in mind that it works both ways. I can be offered a new job tomorrow and give my current employer immediate notice that I'm never coming back. Regardless of at-will employment, the vast majority of employers will still give you plenty of warning before you're fired for performance reasons. It's mainly an issue when a company suddenly has large layoffs. And despite what you see in the media, most people are emplo…

> IOW, the negative aspects of at-will employment really don't have much impact on the average techie's life.

It would for me. It would be a constant worry, being jobless from one day to the next, how to pay the mortgage etc? I would find that a huge negative, even if it doesn't actually end up happening.

Also besides the notice period you're also entitled to a significant fee when you get fired (up to about a year's worth of salary depending on how long you worked for the company). Which is really reassuring especially for paying mortgage etc. I don't want to live on the edge of my seat all the time. And it's also something that stops me from moving to another job because I would have to start from zero and lose this protection. Which I don't mind, I don't like job-hopping anyway.

I really don't like the American mentality of high-risk, high-reward. I don't care much about money but I do care a lot about stability. But anyway I live in Europe and I'm happy with the way things are here. I do hate the neoliberals here that try to make europe like America (which mainly benefits the big corpos, not us).

Re: X ordered to pay €550k to Irish employee fired after yes-or-resign ultimatum

#374

Post by ghaff » Sat, Aug 17, 2024, 7:40 PM UTC

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #357

YZF wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way this worked in many places is that workers formed political parties. In France people did and still take to the streets over labour issues. You can also unionize. Or sure, lobby. But if people are happy with the current system then that's also fine. All in all the US has been a success story. Whether there's correlation or causation between that and some of the regulatory and legal environment is hard to say.…

The fact that this is not happening at a grassroots level in the US would suggest that it's not as big a deal to Americans as the Europeans in this thread think it should be. Speaking only for myself, I've found that when I joined a company whose time-off policies I didn't like (only one so far), I just asked for more time off as part of the deal. The response I got was "sure. It's easier for us to give you more paid…

On the other hand, when I joined a previous employer that (at the time--they improved) had fairly mediocre paid time off policies (not really that bad but it was the first time I had encountered PTO including both vacation and sick time and there was mandatory shutdown around the holidays). When I got what seemed like a pretty generous offer given I was making a relatively small salary at the time and the company was private so no stock, they also made it clear that the PTO was non-negotiable. Now, in practice, given my role no one was eyeing a few hours here and there to go to some appointment or a bit of personal time tacked on to business travel especially if I had traveled over a weekend, but the paper amount of PTO was just so-so.

Re: X ordered to pay €550k to Irish employee fired after yes-or-resign ultimatum

#375

Post by badpun » Sat, Aug 17, 2024, 7:46 PM UTC

busterarm wrote: post #276

deskr wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd assume Ireland has something like bailiffs in the UK. Delta tried not paying around £3000 owed to a customer. He got a court order and sent bailiffs who went to the airport, closed the checking and said they were going seize the plane to pay for the debt. There's a good short documentary about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QSj9odUD_c&t=320s . This link starts at 320 seconds, where the action starts. S…

What physical assets does X have in Ireland to seize? The Fenian street office in Dublin is leased and TikTok took over most of that space anyway.

First things baliffs typically seize are bank accounts, way less fuss with them than with physical assets. You typically only seize physical assets from broke people, or from companies that went bankrupt.

Re: X ordered to pay €550k to Irish employee fired after yes-or-resign ultimatum

#376

Post by CrimsonRain » Sat, Aug 17, 2024, 7:49 PM UTC

VonGallifrey wrote: post #241

pembrook wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know the subtext of this comment is "European labor laws are good." But it seems you've cited an example of something ironically very anti-labor. This means your government has codified into law the false idea that all human employees are undifferentiated commodities (like cattle). So as an employer, if there's no ability to remove underperformers every year, you've turned employment into a market for lemons, and c…

> But it seems you've cited an example of something ironically very anti-labor. This means your government has codified into law the false idea that all human employees are undifferentiated commodities (like cattle). So as an employer, if there's no ability to remove underperformers every year No, that is not the case. You can still fire people and you can do so especially if they are underperforming. You just can't…

You say a lot of things which companies can't actually do in reality.

Show me examples of firing a few underperformers easily from a company.

Re: X ordered to pay €550k to Irish employee fired after yes-or-resign ultimatum

#377

Post by badpun » Sat, Aug 17, 2024, 7:51 PM UTC

lazide wrote: post #288

Timon3 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about SAP?

lol. The German cope is strong here. It doesn’t generally get included for the same reason IBM doesn’t typically get included in list of ‘tech companies’, even if they are one of the oldest actual tech companies. Been around forever (70’s or earlier), large multinational, more about business integration and sales than any headline tech. Frankly, their tech has been a side thought for a very long time internally. It’s…

> Been around forever (70’s or earlier), large multinational, more about business integration and sales than any headline tech.

This fits Microsoft as well. Are they not in tech?

Re: X ordered to pay €550k to Irish employee fired after yes-or-resign ultimatum

#378

Post by ghaff » Sat, Aug 17, 2024, 7:52 PM UTC

gamblor956 wrote: post #370

withinboredom wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, in most (all?) jurisdictions, your employer doesn't really need to have a reason to fire you. They can fire everyone wearing red shirts, if they wanted to. There are also very few places providing leave (outside of white-collar positions). For example, my wife was given two weeks off from her job after having my son. The state we lived in only required maternity leave to be implemented at companies having…

In some places, taking a vacation longer than three weeks requires the company to stop paying your salary and consider you "abandoning" your job, or submitting special paperwork. Possibly in Europe, but this not the law anywhere in the U.S. To the extent that any American corporation requires this, it is purely a corporate policy.

While there are certainly insane laws and regulation in the US, I'm not sure I understand what would even possess a government to require such a thing. I mean, some companies even have paid sabbaticals even if they're not common. That certainly would seem like totally inappropriate meddling into company benefits for no good reason.

I'd understand (though not agree with) an individual company capping an individual vacation at three weeks, but not a (presumably) state law to that effect.

Re: X ordered to pay €550k to Irish employee fired after yes-or-resign ultimatum

#379

Post by badpun » Sat, Aug 17, 2024, 7:55 PM UTC

caskstrength wrote: post #303

surgical_fire wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are effectively buying those labour protections with the difference in salary. Yes. And I appreciate those labor protections enough that I gladly pay for them. I could still buy a car, a house, raise a family, have some savings, etc. The stability and security provided by the labor protections are very much appreciated, a lot more than some extra cash would be.

> I could still buy a car, a house, raise a family, have some savings, etc. You are an outlier. Very few SDEs in EU can afford to raise a family in their own SFH on a single salary while living in a location with any notable IT jobs market.

In Poland, it's not hard. I suspect some other EE countries are similar. Western Europe is harder, with high marginal tax rates and super-expensive real estate.

Re: X ordered to pay €550k to Irish employee fired after yes-or-resign ultimatum

#380

Post by Timon3 » Sat, Aug 17, 2024, 8:05 PM UTC

lazide wrote: post #288

Timon3 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about SAP?

lol. The German cope is strong here. It doesn’t generally get included for the same reason IBM doesn’t typically get included in list of ‘tech companies’, even if they are one of the oldest actual tech companies. Been around forever (70’s or earlier), large multinational, more about business integration and sales than any headline tech. Frankly, their tech has been a side thought for a very long time internally. It’s…

I'm not sure what gave you the impression that the single example I brought up was meant to be exhaustive.

If you want examples that fit some specific definition of "tech company", please share that definition, or where one can look it up. I deliberately didn't bring up more examples than SAP, as I didn't want to get lost in the weeds.