You got distracted by the emphasis on details in recollection of this poignant experience.
> We’ve spent the last few months tweaking the product I work on, running tests and trying to come up with ways of increasing engagement, because not enough customers are renewing their subscriptions.
So serious problems were visible to everyone, but somehow the possibility of job loss was not made clear. This is partly management, but to some extent a full blown sector wide social problem where we distract each other with stories and beliefs that are false until it is too late to react with a realistic assessment of the potential down sides.
> That was nearly two years ago now, back in the middle of 2017. It had been the perfect job for me. ... I spent the next couple of months job hunting. ... world had become a lot bigger and more complicated while I was working in that company, and we hadn’t kept up
And moving on was difficult, involved a lot of rejection, and didn't even properly start until after a major career course correction.
> Looking back now, my old job wasn’t nearly as perfect as I thought it was at the time. ... I had stopped growing.
There is the lesson, and it is a pretty robust one that applies to many readers here.
"If...you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning."
--Catherine Aird
I read the whole thing. It seemed like an article with zero content. That all sounded perfectly normal, and happens to lots of people. I'm not sure it really needed an entire article.
I think you just described all of John Updike’s novels.
Maybe it seemed normal to you as you’ve gone through it but what about the person that hasn’t? They are probably experiencing the same fears and self doubt that the author was.
I’m not sure what you mean by zero content. What were you looking for? The name of the company? That it failed 2 years down the road after they didn’t develop a product as this developer was laid off?
None of that, but to some extent you can't fill a blog with stories like this. It's not really original content. It's happened to so many people, and they eventually find a job, just like this person did.
By zero content I mean a reader will come away from it with no new knowledge, and it will be forgotten soon after.
To me, it read like more like a veiled rant than a lesson. I just hope it was cathartic for the author, at least. I know it is for me when I put my frustrations into words. Although, I usually just delete those words when I'm done.
Posted by an hour old throwaway account referring to a pseudonymous Medium writer discussing an anonymous company's two year old laying off procedure.
I wonder how this made it to the front page, and what we are supposed to take from it other than "company lays people off after assuring them it wouldn't, employee wasn't given much notice and online accounts were locked out during the dismissal call" all of which, in my experience on both sides of the table is completely normal.
It is standard corporate hedging and damage control, and it doesn't make it right, but it is pervasive.
The point of the article was if the person didn't lose their "perfect job" they would never have forced themselves to look for other, better, and more enjoyable opportunities.
I think that happens to a large number of people who have lost a job and found something else. Specifically, if you are laid off, and assuming the entire company / division didn't fold (i.e., they cut 15% from all departments), then chances are that you and the company weren't a good fit for each other. And it is during the job search process that you start to re-evaluate your skill set, what you can do, and what you want to do. Often that will then lead to a better opportunity in which you have improved (if from nothing else than a change of scenery).
Are you sure you read the whole thing? You completely missed the point. They writer has turned getting fired from their "perfect dev job" into realizing their skills had grown out of date and they had simply gotten complacent. Now they are trying a new role, and finding it more fulfilling. I thought i was interesting, and understandably anonymous.
It's a well written blog post. People like reading well written stuff. So it gets upvoted. It speaks for HN that anonymous articles get upvoted as well, not just PR pieces from well known folks.
The story wasn't about "Company A laid people off." It was about "I got laid off and here's what I learned from it." The intention of the story is not to shame the company, but to put into perspective how the writer felt at the time and what they discovered during their job search and as part of their new team.
I'm so glad I'm in a country where you can't be laid off at a moment's notice like that, and I very much hope this is not going to change, despite our disruptive leader™'s wishes.
On the flip side, imagine being a business owner, and having absolutely no options left but to make this decision and salvage what you can left of your business. Should the business risk bankruptcy and cause 100% of the workforce to be jobless, or is it better if just 25% lose it? The company could rebound, and hire an additional 50% on top of the original 100%. It's the circle of business life.
As a person running a business it is your job to ensure that such a thing doesn’t happen. If you have to do sudden immediate layoffs or face bankruptcy that means somebody (probably you) massively messed up.
The way this works in Germany is that if the company is in trouble and goes into insolvency the employment agency pays insolvency money to cover parts of the salary for some time (financed by a fund into which all (with exceptions) employers pay) Thus in the extremely critical situation employees aren't the one immediately suffering from management failure.
Your intention seems honorable, and I am glad you are passionate about keeping your employees jobs. But if I was an investor in your company, I would be concerned that your first focus is not to keep the business afloat. What good are giving employees jobs if you have no business?
Also I think it's a tad naive to think one can possibly know the enumerable circumstances that would force your hand. Suppose you are a company dependent on logistics. Bam, Iraq war. The price of a barrel of oil skyrockets. Your shipping costs have quadrupled. You can keep to your principles and vow to not lay off a single employee, because as you said, this would "demonstrate failure", or you can keep your business and regrettably let go of a few workers in order to keep up with costs. You can try rising your prices, but pretty much a forgone conclusion that a 4x price increase will net you a significant decrease in customers, unless you are a rare unicorn, some good or service one cannot simply be without.
(the above scenario is basically what happened to my father's small business in 2005. Could not keep up with the rise in transportation costs, and cheaper, less quality competitors moved in. Consumers went with the cheaper option. It happens.)
As a citizen, it is your responsibility to make sure you have enough money to support yourself, without relying on society if things go wrong.
Unfortunately, things go wrong. Sometimes you lose your job without warning and your house burns down at the same time. Sometimes, things go wrong no matter how hard you try.
The same is true of companies. Sometimes, you just can't plan your way around things going wrong.
The problem is what justification and whose justification? Under what standard? Additionally, what employee is ever going to feel like their firing is justified?
"Oh shit, well yeah, I guess I would have fired me too."
A mature response for sure, but a highly unlikely one.
If your business cannot figure out its finances well enough to provide a month notice to employees being laid off, you've got some serious incompetency issues.
The US is possibly the only developed nation in the world that believes in "at will" employment, and yet all of those other developed countries (including pretty much the entire G8+) have thriving business market, lots of businesses able to start up, take a shot, go bust, and/or thrive.
When I ran a business I liked to have 2 payrolls worth of cash set aside. So, if a customer was late paying by 3 weeks we'd still be OK. This turned out to be a pretty cautious approach and we were never in danger of missing a payroll (or the following one).
Keep in mind payrolls are for work that's already been performed.
Having enough cash set aside for the work that's been performed plus a month of future work is having 3 payrolls worth of cash set aside at all times.
I could see it working if all companies had to do it, but in a scenario of two identical companies where one can spend more freely they're probably more likely to grow.
A lot of businesses don't have the luxury of positive cashflows that software businesses do.
There are a lot of factors that would contribute to running a business without a month's cash on hand. But I wouldn't say that the business owner is _seriously_ incompetent.
There's money coming for salaries from somewhere. It's not just mysteriously appearing just in time for payroll time.
It takes almost no financial discipline to set aside enough for a couple of months worth of salaries.
If things are getting that tight where that money becomes in jeopardy, the odds of a miraculous turn-around are negligible, and you should have been rethinking everything a lot sooner.
Often times, what one thinks another should do may not be immediately obvious or even remotely close to on another's radar. The beautiful (and sometimes ugly) reality in America is anyone can start a business, and pay some employees. Within that range, you have infinite samples on the "this is how a well oiled machine should run" to "I am doing this for the first time, trying to do the best I can and I hired a few people I know"
Should you be required to know all of these things beforehand before starting a business? Who am I to judge. Ultimately these types of comments display the pure position and perspective of privilege that is so typical on this forum. I am not saying that is a bad thing, we typically talk about the elite companies, and what types of business practices should be followed, just know that this isn't anywhere near close to the majority of American businesses.
I am not one to participate in the current "woke" culture, but
> It takes almost no financial discipline to set aside enough for a couple of months worth of salaries.
This statement drips of pure privilege to me. A couple of months worth of salaries? Are you kidding? Sometimes you have to worry about paying rent on time! We all aren't bootstrapped, VC-backed unicorns. Most of the businesses out there earn every single dollar and have to make tough decisions such as whether or not to pay your employees on time or call the Hobart technician to repair the dishwasher so you can stay open. Oh by the way, the Hobart guy said you need to replace it and it will cost you 10,000 dollars. I think most small business owners are fortunate to have even a couple of weeks set aside.
I know here in the United States we have the WARN Act to require notification about layoffs, but I have no knowledge of how that ends up working out in the real world and whether it would apply in these circumstances. Anybody at Hacker News know?
There are a bunch of gotchas on the WARN act, and companies in America are really good at fudging around to avoid having to make notifications.
> The WARN Act is not activated when a covered employer:
> * closes a temporary facility or completes a temporary project, and the employees working in the facility or temporary project were hired with the clear understanding that their employment would end with the closing of the work facility or the completion of the project; or
> * closes a facility or operating unit because of a strike or a worker lock-out, and the closing is not intended to evade the purposes of the WARN Act.
> * If a plant closing or a mass layoff results in fewer than 50 workers losing their jobs at a single employment site;
> * If 50 to 499 workers lose their jobs and that number is less than 33 percent of the employer's total, active workforce at a single employment site;
> * If a layoff is for 6 months or less; or
> * If work hours are not reduced 50 percent in each month of any 6-month period
please don't quote things this way. even if I maximize the browser window on my desktop, I still have to horizontally scroll each line to read. it's even worse on mobile.
just use a single '>' or italics like everyone else does.
I'm not aware of any country that disallows cutting off your access and ejecting you from the building immediately, and I didn't see anything in the article saying the author's pay ended at a moment's notice?
I don't think you can be kicked out like that (bar committing an egregious breach of company rules / the law) in the UK with zero notice (although I'm not a lawyer, obvs.) (unless the company goes into immediate liquidation? But can that even happen?) You need a consultation period for redundancies and I'm reasonably sure you have to have HR escalation for most other things, IIRC.
Your notice period is about pay, not about having a desk or any work to do.
Because the access to information goes both ways - however useful it may be for you to spend a few weeks telling employees remaining what you know, the company doesn't necessarily want you learning new things.
Yes, I know you can be required to stay out of the building whilst you're on your notice period but the post was about "cutting off your access and ejecting you from the building immediately" and I'm still pretty sure that can't happen in the UK without gross misconduct.
Which country? If your company goes bust the hard way you can.
There are cases of Supposedly worker friendly European companies deliberately making UK subsidiaries bankrupt to avoid statutory redundancy payments and consultation.
Of course the Uk taxpayers picked up the tab for that one its not just FANG's that avoid tax :-)
I've seen this with companies and non-profits in countries like France as well. Instead of attempting to navigate the complex dismissal laws and regulations, they simply close the shop completely and reopen it elsewhere under a different name.
I believe in most EU countries that implement such protection companies can still fire people, they just need to continue paying them for some minimum amount of time.
E.g. in Germany a company has to give at least 4 weeks notice & that time (slowly) increases the longer the employee has been at the company[0]. In practice it often means they are asked not to show up and still get paid for the remainder of their notice period.
Assuming you probably have some unused vacation days if you were fired without warning it's likely you're basically guaranteed an equivalent to a couple months' severance. Generous - but far from "un-fireable".
Locking people out of company chat and other documents during the talk is weird. Wouldn't it make more sense to use the next two weeks or month (whatever the standard period is) to wrap things up and hand them over to other people? This looks like a needless destruction of knowledge.
But then lose access to personal knowledge, making them burning more money when hiring new people.
At my company we have 3 months notice and you can't easily be locked out and set to leave. Some people is also strategically there: if they leave/die, none can replace them as they are the only ones to know some 'secrets'
Yeah, having people you can't afford to lose is an insane risk. Of course it's important to value all your employees, but accidents can always happen. Sometimes people get ill or have an unfortunate accident. Every piece of vital information needs to be known by at least two people and preferably stored somewhere.
But even then, lots of valuable knowledge and experience will still reside in the heads of people, and it's always good to have people share their information about going concerns.
Allowing people to be there "strategically" because they are the sole repository of a critical chunk of knowledge or skill is a serious mismanagement failure.
First, it makes the entire company vulnerable to a single accident to any one of the critical people -- massively increases the risk to every other employee and the owners.
Second, if a person has deliberately worked to somehow create such a critical niche for themselves, I would make it a critical & urgent priority to develop workarounds ASAP, then fire them. Anyone actively working to create their own feifdom and point failure in your organization is not merely neutral, they have made themselves a direct adversary to the company and everyone who works there.
I think a company should be afraid of sabotage if it's actively sabotaging it's employees.
If you're holding monthly all-hands meetings and telling everyone that things are going swimmingly, and all your employees are asking their managers -- is it really? Should I be looking for other jobs just in case? And the script you give to your managers is -- oh, no, you don't need a back up. Everything is fine.
If you know you're about to go out of business in a month unless you secure another round of funding, and you know talks are going terribly, and you're constantly lying to your employees about everything -- yeah, I think it'd be crazy not to expect some retaliation.
One problem with that is that your company may be one month from failure for quite a bit of time. If you look at profit for a new company, it usually starts "positive", but just a little bit, not much at all.
And then you grow the company. This immediately introduces expenses but revenue only grows slowly as new customers come in and get convinced. So it dives below zero, and quite far below zero.
Now at that point you have investors, but they'll be watching how the curve evolves quite a bit. And they'll only be releasing money a few months of runway at a time. And then things get delayed for dumb reasons. So a lot of the time you're a few months from failure, and of course one of these investors might walk away and maybe you can find a new one, maybe not.
So a startup should expect to spend something like 2 years of time "one/two months from failure". Should you really tell your employees this ? It's not going to go very well.
I doubt that in the case of a unorganized failure that it would be very visible for the CEO either, by the way. I mean a week or two earlier than for the employees, sure. But not much more.
It may seem weird, but it is standard operating procedure at many, if not most shops with computer networks.
The tradeoff looks like this: the knowledge potentially preserved & transferred in 2-4 weeks of continued access for everyone is worth far less than the same access used by a disgruntled now-ex-employee to steal IP or do damage.
Even minutes of access to the wrong person is a significant risk.
Plus, if there is a really important or tangled question that only you'll know, they can hire you as a consultant later to sort it out, if needed.
So, wherever you work, be sure to plan and structure your information as if your access can be cut off by surprise at any minute.
Expect only zero notice, and to be marched to the door by security, with somebody else packing your personal stuff into a box and delivering it later. If you get more, consider it a bonus.
Remember, none of this is personal, any more than being required to walk through metal detectors at so many places is personal. It is all about risk management.
> I feel sorry for him. I’m not sure he’s ever been in this position before, and I think I’m the first person today he has to give this news to. He looks a bit overwhelmed, grey-faced, perhaps a bit nervous. He is speaking slowly and carefully. It’s got to be tough to be the one who has to deliver this news to people. It must really suck for him to tell somebody they’re suddenly unemployed.
Long ago, I was let go, with others, by the VP of a company I worked for as the company was faltering. He was a nice guy and I wasn't aware how much it had affected him to do this. I stopped by to visit, some months later, and found out he was in a mental health facility and had to be restrained from trying to climb out a window to get out. Worse--there was no window.
When I started my business, I found it difficult to let people go who were just not capable of doing the job. Those with attitude problems and "cancers" within the company were easier but not really easy. As time passed, I was able to steel myself up against these things. I wouldn't tell them they were fired but, instead, being "let go" cause they couldn't get the job.
I admit to having some pleasure in cutting out the cancererous ones, though.
In my (thankfully small set-size) experience even with attitude problems it's not easy to fire people.
It's really seldom that you have to fire someone who is just a right asshole with no redeeming qualities - quite often they are toxic because they have some mental health issues, or have really bad social skills, or are just for one reason or another really frustrated and taking it out in the wrong way (none of these are excuses to keep them employed mind you).
You can be relieved after the fact that they are gone while still not enjoying having to actually fire them.
I've heard tell that there was a time when it made sense to expect to be in the same job next year that you're in today.
The author seems to have slipped naturally into that mindset. I don't think we live in that time anymore.
While HN repeatedly warns (employee) devs to maintain a mercenary mindset the instinct toward company loyalty seems to have far outlived the loyalty of companies toward their employees.
This is a naive way of looking at things. Your product isn't a thing that robotic ATMs spit out cash for, because they've been told to buy it. Though this perspective is true at some places, it creates a race to the bottom, and will put you out of business. For example, you can sign up contracts for vaporware and then deliver. This may make some money in up-front contract payments, but how long is this business going to last?
Once upon a time, a few employers back, I took a couple year detour into our internal IT department... One day our manager had the misfortune of being asked to help the head of sales with their commission calculation spreadsheet. The IT manager, bless their heart, decided they needed to share a glimpse of that information with someone, and for whatever reason that landed on me.
Every salesperson on that spreadsheet who wasn't on the cusp of being let go was earning more in commission than the cash compensation of any executive listed in our public filings. Our couple of SEs were above Director title comp.
It was a minor shock seeing those numbers, but they reflect a pretty basic economic reality: Acquiring $1 of ARR can be worth quite a bit.
Sure, it's naive to say that Sales Trumps Everyone, Always. But most of the time, for a business with a high enough CLTV to justify having a salesforce, it would be an exceptionally bad sign to see general lay-offs impacting Sales as much as the rest of a company.
> That just didn’t seem like the kind of thing the company I imagined I was working for would do.
In case anyone was wondering why you need a union even when you like your job and your boss, this piece is a pretty good example. Let's organize, y'all!
I'm not sure I follow your statement. If the company had a choice between laying people off and failing, a union coming in and preventing them from laying people off doesn't sound like it would help the situation.
It is usually a false choice. Unions don't stop layoffs but they can help to negotiate the terms of the layoffs and ensure that everyone is respected during the process.
> I was working for a well-established startup with a mission I really believed in, and which felt like it had the potential to be a massive success and shake up the industries it was doing business in.
There is your problem. You naively fell for the BS coming out of some many startups these days..
> I didn’t accept it straight away. To be honest, I was still holding out, hoping that some trendier startup would come along and offer me a job
Seriously? Get real.. If you want to exclusively work for startups that have bean bags in their offices and tell everybody that they are changing the world with whatever silly laundry/food-delivery/ironing-on-demand app they have then thats fine but don't put out a sob story when you realise that these startups are no different than any other business and don't give a damn about changing the world or helping their employees they are just there to make money.
In my short career experience, there is no dream or perfect job. As one gains experience, you can find better and better opportunities, but instead of a single dream job, you end up moving along a pareto optimal border of tradeoffs.
The issue I see is : How do you pay for a mortgage? How do you stay in the same school district without a 2 hour commute?
Job hopping is fine when you're young and can apartment hop every year. But when you get hitched, have a family, want a dog and a yard for the kiddos to play in, job hopping gets a LOT harder. Trying to pay off that mortgage between the two of you ain't easy when your schedule is changing so often (commuting really gets in the way of picking the kids up) and you may be out of work for 6 months or more. Sure, maybe the Bay is job-rich, but then the houses are $3k/mo. for the next 30 years.
Yeah, maybe the job ain't peaches then, you take the stability for the joy. But there ain't any stability either now.
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[ 1124 ms ] story [ 2841 ms ] thread> We’ve spent the last few months tweaking the product I work on, running tests and trying to come up with ways of increasing engagement, because not enough customers are renewing their subscriptions.
So serious problems were visible to everyone, but somehow the possibility of job loss was not made clear. This is partly management, but to some extent a full blown sector wide social problem where we distract each other with stories and beliefs that are false until it is too late to react with a realistic assessment of the potential down sides.
> That was nearly two years ago now, back in the middle of 2017. It had been the perfect job for me. ... I spent the next couple of months job hunting. ... world had become a lot bigger and more complicated while I was working in that company, and we hadn’t kept up
And moving on was difficult, involved a lot of rejection, and didn't even properly start until after a major career course correction.
> Looking back now, my old job wasn’t nearly as perfect as I thought it was at the time. ... I had stopped growing.
There is the lesson, and it is a pretty robust one that applies to many readers here.
"If...you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning." --Catherine Aird
> your perfect job may very well not be
> change is scary, but in the end it'll work out (hopefully)
> don't get too comfortable - hope for the best, expect the worst.
By zero content I mean a reader will come away from it with no new knowledge, and it will be forgotten soon after.
TLDR: Don't confuse a comfortable job with the perfect job.
I wonder how this made it to the front page, and what we are supposed to take from it other than "company lays people off after assuring them it wouldn't, employee wasn't given much notice and online accounts were locked out during the dismissal call" all of which, in my experience on both sides of the table is completely normal.
It is standard corporate hedging and damage control, and it doesn't make it right, but it is pervasive.
Given enough businesses and enough trials, it's a certainty that some leaders will drive them off a cliff.
Also I think it's a tad naive to think one can possibly know the enumerable circumstances that would force your hand. Suppose you are a company dependent on logistics. Bam, Iraq war. The price of a barrel of oil skyrockets. Your shipping costs have quadrupled. You can keep to your principles and vow to not lay off a single employee, because as you said, this would "demonstrate failure", or you can keep your business and regrettably let go of a few workers in order to keep up with costs. You can try rising your prices, but pretty much a forgone conclusion that a 4x price increase will net you a significant decrease in customers, unless you are a rare unicorn, some good or service one cannot simply be without.
(the above scenario is basically what happened to my father's small business in 2005. Could not keep up with the rise in transportation costs, and cheaper, less quality competitors moved in. Consumers went with the cheaper option. It happens.)
Unfortunately, things go wrong. Sometimes you lose your job without warning and your house burns down at the same time. Sometimes, things go wrong no matter how hard you try.
The same is true of companies. Sometimes, you just can't plan your way around things going wrong.
"Oh shit, well yeah, I guess I would have fired me too."
A mature response for sure, but a highly unlikely one.
The US is possibly the only developed nation in the world that believes in "at will" employment, and yet all of those other developed countries (including pretty much the entire G8+) have thriving business market, lots of businesses able to start up, take a shot, go bust, and/or thrive.
Keep in mind payrolls are for work that's already been performed.
Having enough cash set aside for the work that's been performed plus a month of future work is having 3 payrolls worth of cash set aside at all times.
I could see it working if all companies had to do it, but in a scenario of two identical companies where one can spend more freely they're probably more likely to grow.
There are a lot of factors that would contribute to running a business without a month's cash on hand. But I wouldn't say that the business owner is _seriously_ incompetent.
It takes almost no financial discipline to set aside enough for a couple of months worth of salaries.
If things are getting that tight where that money becomes in jeopardy, the odds of a miraculous turn-around are negligible, and you should have been rethinking everything a lot sooner.
Should you be required to know all of these things beforehand before starting a business? Who am I to judge. Ultimately these types of comments display the pure position and perspective of privilege that is so typical on this forum. I am not saying that is a bad thing, we typically talk about the elite companies, and what types of business practices should be followed, just know that this isn't anywhere near close to the majority of American businesses.
I am not one to participate in the current "woke" culture, but
> It takes almost no financial discipline to set aside enough for a couple of months worth of salaries.
This statement drips of pure privilege to me. A couple of months worth of salaries? Are you kidding? Sometimes you have to worry about paying rent on time! We all aren't bootstrapped, VC-backed unicorns. Most of the businesses out there earn every single dollar and have to make tough decisions such as whether or not to pay your employees on time or call the Hobart technician to repair the dishwasher so you can stay open. Oh by the way, the Hobart guy said you need to replace it and it will cost you 10,000 dollars. I think most small business owners are fortunate to have even a couple of weeks set aside.
Edit: You can see an example of WARN Act filings in California here, for example (PDF): https://www.edd.ca.gov/jobs_and_training/warn/WARN_Report_fo...
On there you'll find Instacart, Tesla, Apple, Boeing, PayPal, and others (mostly non-tech, of course).
> The WARN Act is not activated when a covered employer:
> * closes a temporary facility or completes a temporary project, and the employees working in the facility or temporary project were hired with the clear understanding that their employment would end with the closing of the work facility or the completion of the project; or
> * closes a facility or operating unit because of a strike or a worker lock-out, and the closing is not intended to evade the purposes of the WARN Act.
> * If a plant closing or a mass layoff results in fewer than 50 workers losing their jobs at a single employment site;
> * If 50 to 499 workers lose their jobs and that number is less than 33 percent of the employer's total, active workforce at a single employment site;
> * If a layoff is for 6 months or less; or
> * If work hours are not reduced 50 percent in each month of any 6-month period
just use a single '>' or italics like everyone else does.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_leave
Your notice period is about pay, not about having a desk or any work to do.
Because the access to information goes both ways - however useful it may be for you to spend a few weeks telling employees remaining what you know, the company doesn't necessarily want you learning new things.
There are cases of Supposedly worker friendly European companies deliberately making UK subsidiaries bankrupt to avoid statutory redundancy payments and consultation.
Of course the Uk taxpayers picked up the tab for that one its not just FANG's that avoid tax :-)
E.g. in Germany a company has to give at least 4 weeks notice & that time (slowly) increases the longer the employee has been at the company[0]. In practice it often means they are asked not to show up and still get paid for the remainder of their notice period.
Assuming you probably have some unused vacation days if you were fired without warning it's likely you're basically guaranteed an equivalent to a couple months' severance. Generous - but far from "un-fireable".
[0] look at the 2nd table under https://www.finanztip.de/arbeitsrecht-kuendigungsfrist/#c776... "Monate" means months & "Jahre" means years, so e.g. someone with 20 years tenure gets a minimum 7-months notice.
At my company we have 3 months notice and you can't easily be locked out and set to leave. Some people is also strategically there: if they leave/die, none can replace them as they are the only ones to know some 'secrets'
But even then, lots of valuable knowledge and experience will still reside in the heads of people, and it's always good to have people share their information about going concerns.
First, it makes the entire company vulnerable to a single accident to any one of the critical people -- massively increases the risk to every other employee and the owners.
Second, if a person has deliberately worked to somehow create such a critical niche for themselves, I would make it a critical & urgent priority to develop workarounds ASAP, then fire them. Anyone actively working to create their own feifdom and point failure in your organization is not merely neutral, they have made themselves a direct adversary to the company and everyone who works there.
Management needs to rectify that situation, fast.
If you're holding monthly all-hands meetings and telling everyone that things are going swimmingly, and all your employees are asking their managers -- is it really? Should I be looking for other jobs just in case? And the script you give to your managers is -- oh, no, you don't need a back up. Everything is fine.
If you know you're about to go out of business in a month unless you secure another round of funding, and you know talks are going terribly, and you're constantly lying to your employees about everything -- yeah, I think it'd be crazy not to expect some retaliation.
:wink, wink:
If you care about your team, you'll let them know what's really going on, no matter what your exec said.
And then you grow the company. This immediately introduces expenses but revenue only grows slowly as new customers come in and get convinced. So it dives below zero, and quite far below zero.
Now at that point you have investors, but they'll be watching how the curve evolves quite a bit. And they'll only be releasing money a few months of runway at a time. And then things get delayed for dumb reasons. So a lot of the time you're a few months from failure, and of course one of these investors might walk away and maybe you can find a new one, maybe not.
So a startup should expect to spend something like 2 years of time "one/two months from failure". Should you really tell your employees this ? It's not going to go very well.
I doubt that in the case of a unorganized failure that it would be very visible for the CEO either, by the way. I mean a week or two earlier than for the employees, sure. But not much more.
The tradeoff looks like this: the knowledge potentially preserved & transferred in 2-4 weeks of continued access for everyone is worth far less than the same access used by a disgruntled now-ex-employee to steal IP or do damage.
Even minutes of access to the wrong person is a significant risk.
Plus, if there is a really important or tangled question that only you'll know, they can hire you as a consultant later to sort it out, if needed.
So, wherever you work, be sure to plan and structure your information as if your access can be cut off by surprise at any minute.
Expect only zero notice, and to be marched to the door by security, with somebody else packing your personal stuff into a box and delivering it later. If you get more, consider it a bonus.
Remember, none of this is personal, any more than being required to walk through metal detectors at so many places is personal. It is all about risk management.
Long ago, I was let go, with others, by the VP of a company I worked for as the company was faltering. He was a nice guy and I wasn't aware how much it had affected him to do this. I stopped by to visit, some months later, and found out he was in a mental health facility and had to be restrained from trying to climb out a window to get out. Worse--there was no window.
When I started my business, I found it difficult to let people go who were just not capable of doing the job. Those with attitude problems and "cancers" within the company were easier but not really easy. As time passed, I was able to steel myself up against these things. I wouldn't tell them they were fired but, instead, being "let go" cause they couldn't get the job.
I admit to having some pleasure in cutting out the cancererous ones, though.
It's really seldom that you have to fire someone who is just a right asshole with no redeeming qualities - quite often they are toxic because they have some mental health issues, or have really bad social skills, or are just for one reason or another really frustrated and taking it out in the wrong way (none of these are excuses to keep them employed mind you).
You can be relieved after the fact that they are gone while still not enjoying having to actually fire them.
The author seems to have slipped naturally into that mindset. I don't think we live in that time anymore.
While HN repeatedly warns (employee) devs to maintain a mercenary mindset the instinct toward company loyalty seems to have far outlived the loyalty of companies toward their employees.
LOL. Sales and marketing bring in the money. Everyone else is just an expense.
Also sales people are much cheaper than developers.
Every salesperson on that spreadsheet who wasn't on the cusp of being let go was earning more in commission than the cash compensation of any executive listed in our public filings. Our couple of SEs were above Director title comp.
It was a minor shock seeing those numbers, but they reflect a pretty basic economic reality: Acquiring $1 of ARR can be worth quite a bit.
Sure, it's naive to say that Sales Trumps Everyone, Always. But most of the time, for a business with a high enough CLTV to justify having a salesforce, it would be an exceptionally bad sign to see general lay-offs impacting Sales as much as the rest of a company.
In case anyone was wondering why you need a union even when you like your job and your boss, this piece is a pretty good example. Let's organize, y'all!
There is your problem. You naively fell for the BS coming out of some many startups these days..
> I didn’t accept it straight away. To be honest, I was still holding out, hoping that some trendier startup would come along and offer me a job
Seriously? Get real.. If you want to exclusively work for startups that have bean bags in their offices and tell everybody that they are changing the world with whatever silly laundry/food-delivery/ironing-on-demand app they have then thats fine but don't put out a sob story when you realise that these startups are no different than any other business and don't give a damn about changing the world or helping their employees they are just there to make money.
In my short career experience, there is no dream or perfect job. As one gains experience, you can find better and better opportunities, but instead of a single dream job, you end up moving along a pareto optimal border of tradeoffs.
Job hopping is fine when you're young and can apartment hop every year. But when you get hitched, have a family, want a dog and a yard for the kiddos to play in, job hopping gets a LOT harder. Trying to pay off that mortgage between the two of you ain't easy when your schedule is changing so often (commuting really gets in the way of picking the kids up) and you may be out of work for 6 months or more. Sure, maybe the Bay is job-rich, but then the houses are $3k/mo. for the next 30 years.
Yeah, maybe the job ain't peaches then, you take the stability for the joy. But there ain't any stability either now.