131–140 of 162 posts
I had a recruiter send me an email exactly 5 months ago today claiming "I've placed ten folks with AOL in the past year, and Patch is the most profitable and exciting division especially for the engineers." First time I've ever had to respond to a recruiter to tell them they were full of shit. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/08/09/layoffs...
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Its not Capitalism, its Lawyerism. The sad fact that you can get sued for being something other than a robot is horrible. The HR / Lawyer part of our economy is one heck of an anchor compared to the legitimate wrongful termination and employment discrimination.
I think you're really underestimating the stupid shit companies say and do when dealing with employees, and its the potential for stupid shit that drives the excess of caution. Say an HR drone lays off a woman with kids (or a pregnant lady), and says "sorry! Well at least you'll get to spend a little more time with little Jimmy!" Or, take many blue collar jobs. If you lay off a black or Hispanic employee, there is a…
I don't know if anyone is really that stupid especially someone who is in charge of firing. That is like rubbing salt in your wounds. A better way would be "Sorry you have to go through this but we have no choice because ". May be I am rating those firing-in-charge people way too high intellectually. But I find this argument that "companies are too stupid hence they would rather not say anything human" seems far fetched. I am probably too naive though.
The fact that it was over the phone is a legitimate insult. The fact that it was 100 seconds long is a mercy.
Wow. That was incredible. The monotonous way in which the message was delivered, the complete lack of emotion and empathy, is appalling. Notice she did not apologize nor express any condolences beyond declaring the new unemployed state of those people to be "unfortunate." Without knowing much about the situation (I only listened to the recording), and leaving myself wide open to be corrected by someone with more insi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its not Capitalism, its Lawyerism. The sad fact that you can get sued for being something other than a robot is horrible. The HR / Lawyer part of our economy is one heck of an anchor compared to the legitimate wrongful termination and employment discrimination.
I think you're really underestimating the stupid shit companies say and do when dealing with employees, and its the potential for stupid shit that drives the excess of caution. Say an HR drone lays off a woman with kids (or a pregnant lady), and says "sorry! Well at least you'll get to spend a little more time with little Jimmy!" Or, take many blue collar jobs. If you lay off a black or Hispanic employee, there is a…
> Say an HR drone lays off a woman with kids (or a pregnant lady), and says "sorry! Well at least you'll get to spend a little more time with little Jimmy!"
I would say that was a stupid comment, but not worth the millions it will cost the company in litigation. If the firing reason was not pregnancy / kids then it is still legitimate.
The very real problems that are encountered at the workplace are shadowed by the unreal "problems". I do not like giving up our humanity to follow a damage control doctrine that causes more damage.
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What's crazy is that the US is an "at will" employment law. Which means you can get fired (or quit) for any trivial reason at all what so ever (the meaning of 'at will'). The only people with legal recourse are protected classes (ie, minorities). But it would be both improbable and abusive if mass-lafoffs were only legal fodder in this context. Who the heck else is suing and for what? Or is it just the threat of laws…
> What's crazy is that the US is an "at will" employment law. I live in an "at will" state and it hasn't been a problem. I believe in freedom of association.
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I'm assuming this was a call with all the remote staff that edit the individual sites and live in the communities that the sites cover. I don't think they were going to fly them all into a central location to fire them.
For a small company, I wonder how much that would add to the wind-down costs. Fly everyone to Las Vegas for a company offsite/conference, announce the firing at the 10am meeting, give everyone $X00 in extra termination pay up front and tell them to hit the slots. If you're already planning to spend $5-20k per employee for X weeks severance, an extra $1-2k per employee for the offsite firing might only increase your w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're really underestimating the stupid shit companies say and do when dealing with employees, and its the potential for stupid shit that drives the excess of caution. Say an HR drone lays off a woman with kids (or a pregnant lady), and says "sorry! Well at least you'll get to spend a little more time with little Jimmy!" Or, take many blue collar jobs. If you lay off a black or Hispanic employee, there is a…
I don't think I am underestimating the stupidity of companies, because the threat of lawsuit and the industry (HR, training) around it is a huge influence. It overrides any and all other concerns when doing any HR activity especially those with high stress such as firing. > Say an HR drone lays off a woman with kids (or a pregnant lady), and says "sorry! Well at least you'll get to spend a little more time with littl…
The fact that it was over the phone is a legitimate insult. The fact that it was 100 seconds long is a mercy.
One company I worked for was acquired by a much larger tech company. We were already had about a 1000 employees. After the big announcement that we were being acquired, we all got an invite from the new company to meet the new executive team at their big corporate HQ.
Got bused over, we were all shepherded into a huge auditorium only to have the CEO of the larger company tell us we were all being let go and turn in our ID's to the security folks now standing at the exits.
It was the quietest bus ride I've ever been on during the return trip.
To do it via a conference call? What a piss poor leader and dick move.
I'm assuming this was a call with all the remote staff that edit the individual sites and live in the communities that the sites cover. I don't think they were going to fly them all into a central location to fire them.