We need more calm companies • Hacker News Board

Re: We need more calm companies

#21

Post by ProblemExplorer » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 4:33 PM UTC

> Getting laid off doesn’t just rattle your career; it shakes the very foundation of your life. I've seen friends lose their jobs and go into an existential tailspin. It's not uncommon for them to blame themselves and to feel immense guilt and shame. The experience is especially hard on parents whose families depend on them for income.

What shook me up is when top performing coworkers were "laid off" because, due to recent downmarket conditions, there were slightly less competent candidates available at a heavy discount. These top performing coworkers worked extremely hard, were great at their jobs and often sacrificed personally when the company needed them but they were good negotiators as well and had negotiated good, above market salaries.

Once the project took off, the owners fired them and replaced them with cheaper workers who weren't as good but good enough to maintain and update the product.

It feels to me like the owners gave these people an impression that they would be long term employees, where their short term sacrifices would pay off long term, but effectively used them as flat rate contractors while paying them employee rates (instead of contractor rates).

I wish there was a way to detect such owners.

Re: We need more calm companies

#22

Post by ProblemExplorer » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 4:45 PM UTC

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #6

Replace "calm" with "privately owned". Investors that aren't actually invested in the company for the long term are ruinous.

> Replace "calm" with "privately owned".

I wouldn't make that claim - it's about the mindset. I've seen plenty of privately owned companies where the owners heavily churn through employees extracting as much as they can from each person and spitting them out.

Their attitude is "I can't pay at or above market, so this employee will eventually leave, so why should I invest in this employee? Let me extract as much as I can while they are here"

Re: We need more calm companies

#23

Post by deprecative » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 7:27 PM UTC

ProblemExplorer wrote: post #21

> Getting laid off doesn’t just rattle your career; it shakes the very foundation of your life. I've seen friends lose their jobs and go into an existential tailspin. It's not uncommon for them to blame themselves and to feel immense guilt and shame. The experience is especially hard on parents whose families depend on them for income. What shook me up is when top performing coworkers were "laid off" because, due to…

Are you labor working for capital? If so, you work for someone who will fire you for a less expensive version as long as the quality of work is, even superficially, acceptably similar. That's it. That's the flow chart.

Re: We need more calm companies

#24

Post by noahwhygodwhy » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 10:10 PM UTC

deprecative wrote: post #23

ProblemExplorer wrote: post #21

> Getting laid off doesn’t just rattle your career; it shakes the very foundation of your life. I've seen friends lose their jobs and go into an existential tailspin. It's not uncommon for them to blame themselves and to feel immense guilt and shame. The experience is especially hard on parents whose families depend on them for income. What shook me up is when top performing coworkers were "laid off" because, due to…

Are you labor working for capital? If so, you work for someone who will fire you for a less expensive version as long as the quality of work is, even superficially, acceptably similar. That's it. That's the flow chart.

Yeah, humans looking to make money lack empathy, which is why regulation is needed to force them to act as if they do

Re: We need more calm companies

#25

Post by kcsavvy » Mon, Apr 15, 2024, 4:02 AM UTC

ProblemExplorer wrote: post #19

kcsavvy wrote: post #10

Calm companies exist everywhere. In fact, calm companies probably outnumber “frenzied” companies 10x. They are the quiet, stable, regional, unsexy businesses that have been around for 40 years. I have a friend who is an SWE at a large regional insurance broker. Very calm work indeed. They just don’t pay SV wages.

> They just don’t pay SV wages. As a candidate, how do you separate this kind of company from one where the owners are cheap and want to pay you as less as possible? There are a lot of companies that advertise terrific WLB, pictures of their employees and their families laughing only to find out none of those employees work there any longer and the pictures were taken on their once-every-10-years retreat at a cheap h…

I think the stereotypical calm company is one with strong financial performance in a stable industry that is somewhat insulated from swings in the macro economy. Think large regional players in insurance, healthcare, finance, banking, etc. It’s large enough to have “professional” managers and a big customer base (so one customer having a problem is not a hair-on-fire emergency).

In my experience you tend to find many more penny pinching owners in the world of small businesses, not at a 1000-person regional life insurance company.