191–200 of 454 posts
My friend's company Iron.io laid off ~20 employees in SF (almost the entire company). Apparently their series A round brought in 12 million just a year ago.
Better than anything from any of the major cloud providers. The only problem is that it's hard to beat having your entire platform in the one place. Especially for billing, security etc.
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What's the difference between being fired and laid off?
In the UK, "getting fired" or "getting the sack" means you were incompetent (or commited misconduct) and are sent home. For incompentance, they can only do this after a "performance review" (they have to give you 3 months to improve, I think). "Laid off" is called being "made redundant". The company can do this much more easily to a bunch of people, but it generally has to pay them ~6 months salary and can't hire new…
With redundancy the job is 100% gone, with a layoff the job may come back ie a factory may lay off the night shift - with expectation that if things pick up the nightshift will be re hired.
When I read this, all I could picture was the scene in HBO's 'Silicon Valley' where Gavin Belson sacks his entire Nucleus team, then later inadvertently hires them all back again when he acquires EndFrame, and doesn't realise that he is talking to the same people in the same room about the same product.
argh, spoilers :(
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You don't get 6 months salary, that's never been a thing. Unless there's something different in your contract, it's a week per year worked. A normal contract clause in the UK is that it's a month or 6 weeks notice both ways after a probationary period of 3 or 6 months, so that's usually a minimum. https://www.gov.uk/redundant-your-rights/redundancy-pay
Thanks for correcting me, clearly I've only ever heard about it from people who had been working somewhere for a long time!
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In the UK, "getting fired" or "getting the sack" means you were incompetent (or commited misconduct) and are sent home. For incompentance, they can only do this after a "performance review" (they have to give you 3 months to improve, I think). "Laid off" is called being "made redundant". The company can do this much more easily to a bunch of people, but it generally has to pay them ~6 months salary and can't hire new…
You forgot about being 'sent to Coventry' - i.e. the company doesn't want to pay you redundancy, and can't fire you for incompetence, so you get ignored, not given any work, get put in a useless role, etc until you wise up and quit/find another job. British passive aggressiveness at its finest! Being American. I would have had no problem with being fired aka 'you're now surplus' and it would have been far more helpfu…
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> and personally, as an employee, I'm fine with it that way You mean as a reasonably well-off employee who was lucky enough to have picked a growing field when you went to uni. On the other hand, if that field ever stops growing for any reason... you might see why people enjoy stability and the ability to plan ahead in their work life.
Some people think that pro-employee laws are not in fact good for employees. Regardless of whether or not you agree with them, it's super uncharitable to dismiss them in this way.
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Sent to Coventry appears to be Constructive Dismissal under UK law https://www.gov.uk/dismissal/unfair-and-constructive-dismiss... Of course it might not be worth the lawsuit.
It's almost always worth the lawsuit, it's cheaper for a company to pay an employee off than fight them in court. The actual numbers of people who take abusive companies to court is low, just look up the statistics of companies who constructively dismiss women after pregnancies, compared to the number who actually get sued.
On the other hand, full respect to anyone who stands up for themselves when the situation warrants it.
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argh, spoilers :(
Oh, drat - I'm sorry. I had assumed most HN readers would have seen the series already - it was on a while back, wasn't it? (We only just saw it in Australia, which is usually an indication that is has been on in the US about a year ago?!?)
Not the BEST warning but not nothing...
Back in the first dotcom bubble, we had FuckedCompany.com. It tracked these sorts of things on a daily basis.
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I did a double-take when I saw Twitter posting[0] in the Who's Hiring thread. What's the rationale here? Why are they firing and hiring at the same time? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12851502
I believe the hiring is a facade. They have been sending out hackerrank tests to every new grad but never planning to follow up. As a matter of fact, they stated that they will "follow up" in December. Any serious company in the Bay Area wouldn't be this slow with hiring if they were not in trouble.