Ah that really sucks. Hopefully they got the same email from A&A the rest of us at other Disney subsidiaries received, meaning they'd still have their healthcare benefits covered and Disney will be handling employee/company premiums.
Huge shoutout to the Imagineering team, their work is incredible!
Wow, that's some testament to employee morale. The company you work for effectively fires you because things don't go so rosy for a month and all you want is to go back lol.
The company can really be lucky to have you and I guess you can be lucky to have such a great work that you actually want to go back after they pull off a stunt like this (which is essentially a punch in the face).
Unfortunately for many people, because things like this just show companies that they can (even) treat high-tech employees like disposable items and get away with it. The right reaction would be to make sure that no one in your division EVER goes back to this company and prevents everyone in their close circle to start working there, unless they pay some really nice and big severance package.
I wonder if this is more related to "game development". This isn't game development but it is kinda related. Perhaps people just think differently there and the normal employer - employee separation of concerns just goes out of the window. An employer collects HUGE profits from your work in the IT sector, no matter your level. You, as an employee, sacrifice these profits for convenience, essentially. Now they take your convenience away and you still want to work there. It's kinda baffling to me. And the game industry always spat on engineers, probably because too many people "want" to do it.
We asked you to stop posting in the flamewar style to HN. Since your last three comments are this one, "So what? Did you ever look at a production codebase?", and "Right, so you would rather die than risk germ infection?", it seems clear that you don't mean to use HN as intended, which is to say for curious conversation.
Therefore I've banned the account. If that ever changes, you're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com and let us know. In the meantime, please stop creating accounts to break HN's rules with.
I'm from a country with public health care, so this comes as an interesting shock - would employees immediately lose health benefits if made redundant / fired etc?
Seems to incentivize getting rid of people when they need healthcare the most (eg "I have cancer" -> "Look, we're going to have to let you go, your performance the past few months hasn't been up to scratch"). I assume there'd be a bunch of health related after-effects to jobloss too, particularly around mental well-being.
We have a law called COBRA that lets you continue your employers coverage for up to 18 months I think it is. You have to pay the entire premium including the portion your employer paid so the price tag is usually a shock.
So on Friday you have good health coverage, and then you get a recorded message on Zoom from your now former job. Now you have to pay for COBRA but you only have enough money reserves for two months of housing/food. So you apply for MediCal. Nope, you have too much money. So the reasonable thing to do is to take no health insurance.
Then, you get the coronavirus. Pretty bad. You’re young, so you live through it, but those days on a ventilator weren’t cheap. But unfortunately for you, the ambulance driver took you to one of those hospitals that sues its patients for non-payment. You should have told them to take you to a different hospital as you were gasping for breath.
In any case, you now have a medical debt of $40000 for a week or two of ICU. You have to file for bankruptcy. Unfortunately you’re young, so you’re barely into the principal on the house. So that’s gone.
Luckily, you still have your car. At least you can get to interviews for the few jobs left in the recession. But it’s sure hard to show up looking clean without a shower. At least now, you’re eligible for public insurance.
If you lapse in payment in your inherited coverage from your previous workplace, and get a new plan, will they take a premium for any pre-existing conditions they deem you might have?
I would recommend to anyone to do what it takes to pay for the COBRA. You have 60 days from the last day of your coverage to elect it, and a grace period of 45 days after that to make a payment. If you manage to find another job with benefits before then, and don’t need to make any insurance claims, you can drop the whole thing and not pay.
Yes, US health policy leaves much to be desired. But a few points:
Up to eighty percent of people on ventilators die to Coronavirus die. (This percentage is so shockingly bad that some doctors are doing all they can to avoid or delay using them.)
Most who need ventilators for Coronavirus are older and have other health issues already.
As someone in a high risk category due to being medically handicapped, I will suggest that a lot of those people aren't hale and hardy enough to have a good job with good benefits. I've done freelance work for years.
Though, yes, it's true: In spite of the "all homeless are junkies and crazies" meme, serious health problems and their cost are a significant contributor to people ending up homeless in the US. Another major piece is our lack of appropriate housing options.
In addition to fixing healthcare, the US desperately needs to fix it's housing issues.
> Now you have to pay for COBRA but you only have enough money reserves for two months of housing/food.
Upon passage of the CARES act, everyone that loses their job due to COVID is eligible for UI, and the federal UI is now $600/week, on top of the existing state UI. So in the state of California, an ex-Disney employee would receive $4200/month[1].
If you're single, $4200/month in California will more than pay for rent + health insurance + food.
If you're a working couple, together you will receive $8400/month.
So yeah people totally lose their health care when they lose their job. Typically it runs through the month and then you’re on your own. You can by law keep buying the same plan at full price (employers typically pay between 50-80 and sometimes up to 100% of the premium).
However, when you get sick that rate doesn’t go up, so there’s no incentive from your employers standpoint to fire you when sick. Because of the “losing coverage” part it’s still extra shitty when they double up (cancer plus being fired sounds pretty awful).
Obamacare notably created markets for folks not receiving health insurance through work to purchase it directly (in addition to subsidies for low to middle income folks to do so, and several regulatory changes around other parts of the system), but that basic system wasn’t fundamentally altered and has been more or less how the US has done things since world war 2.
Fun bonus fact, employer based insurance was first offered as a workaround for world war 2 era wage controls.
Large employers typically self-insure, including a large majority of companies with over 500 employees [1]. You might see, say, Blue Cross on your card, but they’re just administering - the actual payments to doctors, etc. are in fact coming from your company. Sometimes the company will still show a percentage of “premium” that they are covering; it’s not a real premium in that case, just a percentage of the average care covered per employee.
> Fun bonus fact, employer based insurance was first offered as a workaround for world war 2 era wage controls.
Plus, its tax incentivized in three different ways.
- The employer can deduct it as a business expense, reducing corporate profits on which they have to pay income tax. In fairness, wages work the same way...
- ...but! The employer doesn't have to pay payroll tax on the amount it adds to their payroll.
- And while the employer puts it on the employee's W2, it doesn't contribute to their taxable income.
Dodging two kinds of income tax and payroll tax means that it works out to be way cheaper for a company to buy health insurance for their employees than it would be to raise their employees pay enough that they could buy the same insurance themselves, and that's before the company leverages its purchasing power to get good deals from insurance companies. It's an absurdly strongly incentivized system.
Companies big enough that "buy health insurance for their employees" is a thing pay insurance companies to administer the plans and they pay the medical costs as well. When an employee of such a company files a claim, the company ultimately pays the cost. I'm skeptical increased payroll taxes are more than these companies' cost to provide insurance. Also, payroll taxes themselves are also deductible.
> I'm skeptical increased payroll taxes are more than these companies' cost to provide insurance.
Doesn't seem unlikely to me, once you have enough employees, average cost per employee ends up being about the population average, skewed heavily by the fact that the company isn't employing very many people past retirement age where so much of total medical expense lies. Profit margins for health insurance companies aren't very high, so after administrative costs, what the average person/company pays in healthcare insurance is about what the average person accrues to their insurance in healthcare costs.
> Also, payroll taxes themselves are also deductible.
Shifting compensation to untaxed benefits brings the savings from corp_tax_rate * payroll_tax_rate to payroll_tax_rate.
"However, when you get sick that rate doesn’t go up, so there’s no incentive from your employers standpoint to fire you when sick."
Sorry but that's just wrong. Most large employers and even many smaller shops "self-insure" meaning they are footing the bill. Your health insurance company is just a front/conduit/paper pusher. In those cases, it is your employer who is ultimately deciding your prescription is not in the formulary, your jaw surgery is cosmetic even though you suffer from chronic headaches, etc. It is also your employer who sees that employee number 438 is costing them >> 1M/yr in covered medical bills (cuz cancer). They have every incentive to suddenly realize you are not working out for entirely unrelated (and fake) reasons.
A. If you are a military retiree or military dependent (spouse or child), medical coverage is free and works differently from the rest of the system. This may be ten percent or more of the population, as a hand wavy wild guess. (If that sounds high, a foreign friend used to tell me Americans are rabidly militaristic nutcases with an insanely high percentage of people here who have spent time in the military.)
B. You can also be covered under your spouse's work plan. So losing your job doesn't necessarily cut you out completely.
C. A few years ago, we changed the law to make it possible to remain covered by your parents' healthcare up to age 26, even if you are married.
D. If you are old enough, there's Medicare. If you are poor enough, there's Medicaid.
If none of those situations apply, yup, it sucks big time. The high cost of COBRA makes that option an ugly joke for a lot of unemployed people who simply can't afford it.
The US should join the rest of the developed world and provide universal coverage.
Edit: For context, my father, ex husband, father-in-law and assorted other relatives were career military. I'm not anti military. I'm just trying to say "That's totes a good faith wild guess!"
Nothing rabid about it, it's very rational if you and your whole family gets to be a Heinleinian Real American Citizen with HealthCare ™ after a stint in the military. Plus the neighbours give you salutes on the 4th of July.
A very significant percentage of employment in the US is contract work. So people quite often need to purchase their own insurance to get a good plan.
I couldn't really afford a good plan along with everything else so I just moved to Mexico.
Lemonodor once wrote a clone of Lucene in Common Lisp that he called Montezuma. It was based on the Ruby port [1]. Lucene itself is written in Java, but its original research version was prototyped in...Lisp. I learned a lot reading John's blog.
Imagineering is incredibly competitive, and furlough allows employees to pull unemployment benefits temporarily. My guess would be that if Disney can bring them back and get them to work within 2 months, they'll lose very few of the employees.
(this really isn't far from how Denmark is handling the crisis nationally -- freeze employment, have the government pay salaries, and do their best to have companies pick back up where they left off w/ the same workforce).
They're furloughed, not laid off. I doubt they'll lose anyone who wasn't intending to leave.
I get that John is down, and I definitely don't have whatever insight led him to say "even if I'm lucky enough to return someday, other people won't be". From my understanding though, a huge portion of corporate around the stores and parks was furloughed because there's not much for them to do at home. Their healthcare is covered and kindness aside it doesn't make much sense for Disney to bleed money. But this wasn't a covert layoff — when things get back to speed Disney wants people back.
Edit: And furloughing the employees allows them to claim unemployment, so that the US government can absorb the impact rather than Disney. Not pretty, but rational in a time of stimulus.
I wonder what happened to all the H1Bs and postdocs. Disney Imagineering employed quite a few graduates in Robotics and Graphics (typically, from India and China).
More like their money printer, ESPN, ran out of ink. Theme parks shuttered, movie shoots scrubbed. Theatrical releases delayed to next year. Disney+ is doing great but that’s like saying the orchestra makes great iceberg accompaniment.
They are freaked out and making any decision they can to stop the cash burn, if it’s a good idea or not.
For the size of Disney empire, they'd have more than enough cash to survive as a whole for months instead of cutting pay to [sic] Imagineering R&D department.
Look at this thread. More than just Disney is overrun by people gleefully watching others’ misery, and explaining to them how their family happens to be exactly the sort of ritual sacrifice their religion of money needs these days.
The only difference between "furloughed" and "laid off" is whether the health-care benefits continue.
There's a strange detail I learnt, if you're laid-off then COBRA still only helps you if your employer keeps the same plan (i.e if they switch to a high deductible plan, yours changes too).
You've unfortunately been posting a lot of unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN. We ban accounts that do that, because not only is it not in the spirit of curious conversation, it kills that spirit. Would you please stop that and use HN as intended?
Ethically it means you should take care of your employees during a pandemic or any other exceptional circumstance.
You know - the staff that were there for you, building your empire when times were good. Now they are suffering and Disney is posting record income numbers.
You sound like one of the asshole, cut-throat managers who makes decisions like this. I hope people like you die in a fire.
Of course strong feelings arise with this subject matter, and doubly so during a crisis. But if you're commenting here, you need not to let that propel you into personal attack or verbal violence. Maybe you don't owe corporate apologists or Disney executives better, but you owe this community better if you're posting here (much better).
It's also not in your interest to post like this. It will appeal only to a subset of the readers who already agree with you, but alienate everyone else. In other words, the price you pay for the momentary relief of venting is that your comment discredits your own position, making the truth in it harder for others to perceive and actually driving them further away from you. That harms your cause.
Please don't post unsubstantive comments here, regardless of how wrong another comment is (or you feel it is). It helps nothing; it just makes the thread even worse.
Agreed, if it causes the company to have severe financial distress or even possibly go bankrupt, hard decisions such as these have to be made. If the company goes under lots more jobs and wealth is lost.
they obviously won't go under, they will have a bad year. Companies often cut staff during bad years, but this is a bad year for everyone and a special occurrence hopefully not repeated in the following years. Still, since there are government programs in place maybe Disney should be taking advantage of them by furloughing their engineers that they can't necessarily use to best effect right now.
Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly, and we ban accounts that do that because it kills the spirit of curious conversation, which this site exists for.
If you wouldn't mind taking a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and using HN in the intended spirit, we'd appreciate it. It's understandable that temperatures rise and pots boil over, but we all need to control ourselves in those areas, or else we end up ruining this place.
> we all need to control ourselves in those areas, or else we end up ruining this place.
So you don’t think attitudes like what trophycase was responding to, ruins this site? I’ve known more programmers leave this site because of ugly attitudes worded civilly and so left unchecked, than because of responses like the one you’re complaining about. I think you’re threatening to ban the wrong people.
Yeah, but like, you're asking for empathy from dang. They don't know what it's like to be an engineer on corporate salary, or how it feels to be paid a five-figure bonus for delivering a seven-figure feature. They can't reason about what is happening at Disney or other corporations, except abstractly and without an understanding of the human cost.
The moderators are not here to improve the conversation. They are not here to contribute. They do not have interesting things to say. They are here to remove things and people which offend them.
> So you don’t think attitudes like what trophycase was responding to, ruins this site?
That doesn't follow, and I'd be careful about drawing such conclusions. It's difficult to reply meaningfully to general statements like those in your comment here, because they can actually be referring to a wide range of different things. I'd really need to see specific links.
In the case of the comment trophycase was responding to (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22820206), the fact that it was heavily downvoted already indicates a kind of community moderation, signalling that there's something objectionable about the post. The fact that I didn't reply with additional censure doesn't mean I somehow like the post or agree with it. It was a low-information comment with an ideological slant. But HN gets a huge number of those, from all ideological sides. If we were going to try to moderate all of them, first of all we couldn't because we'd be spending all our time doing nothing else, and second it would generate a massive backlash from users who don't agree that such comments clear the threshold for public scolding.
(The difference between that and "Ah yes. Hard decisions about whether the new CEO will wipe his ass with that 11 billion, or use it as fuel for his fireplace. Decisions, decisions." is pretty stark. Note also that I was responding to a repeated pattern.)
I'm by no means happy about such comments on HN, but there are limits, much harder limits than people assume, to what moderation power can achieve. Usually when people demand more from moderation, what they seem to want is for us to ban anyone who supports an ideology they disagree with. That's not an option for HN (even though we get accused of doing it all the time). It would kill the community, and I don't see what good that would do anyone.
Its not destroyed. You still have Disney on your resume and you didn't get fired for anything dumb you did.
Having been through this stuff a couple times and heard these reactions before, I can tell you most people, esp those from blue chips, get picked up fast.
Covid changes things yes, but the system is not static. Response and handling of it will get better and better week by week as people learn and adapt. Companies will restart work and hiring sooner or later. Look at S.Korea. They got hit by MERS. They learnt, evolved new plans and this time around were prepared.
> Covid changes things yes, but the system is not static
Yes, it is. People literally cannot leave their houses. There are certainty some online/100% remote jobs that will hire you via webcam, but most don't. And I'm saying that as a guy who has been 100% remote for the past 5+ years now. All, every single one, of my remote gigs had me show up and interview in person. That's just not an option for huge swaths of the US, and may not be for months yet.
> Response and handling of it will get better and better week by week as people learn and adapt. Companies will restart work and hiring sooner or later. Look at S.Korea. They got hit by MERS. They learnt, evolved new plans and this time around were prepared.
They're predicting as high as 50% of the local businesses failing in my city by the end of summer, and I've heard similar doom and gloom about other parts of N. America. S. Korea is an outlier in most respects, and there is little reason to believe that the responses put out by other nations will be as effective. The UK lagged on their COVID response and now their PM is in the ICU. Sweden just isn't doing anything, and it looks like Trump is trying to cause a civil war in the US by stealing resources from the states.
The worse is yet to come, IMO, and these former Disney workers are right to curse their employer.
There are extensive government programs to help that were recently passed. Obviously the programs probably won't pay the full salary of an engineer or tech employee, but there is help.
> Any full-time or part-time worker who is furloughed, laid off or had their hours reduced due to the coronavirus is eligible for expanded unemployment benefits.
Thanks Justin. Do you manage your company like this too? When times are good, you take all the profit and when times are bad it's "fuck you" to the employee and go stand in government handout lines?
Even at most cynical, it would be "When times are good, you take profit while also paying payroll tax, income tax, property tax, unemployment taxes, social security taxes, medicare taxes and when times are bad, some of your employees use those government programs you've been funding during the good times"
Probably that implies he doesn't want a big thread about it here either, so I've buried this one. If it were a discussion worth keeping, that might be a hard call, but it's mostly wretched.
Absolutely. But even if such contracts were possible, wouldn’t people avoid signing contracts that allow the employer to simply stop paying?
My contract has a 3 month notice so unless I agree to anything else, I’d be paid 3 months regardless of whether the business is able to operate at all.
But I suppose that if my contract didn’t have that and I instead had a signing bonus or some other comp that gave me a few months of security then that would be equivalent.
It's uncommon in the US to have a set duration employment contract - almost every state allows either side to terminate employment for almost any reason. Those represented by unions usually do have a collective bargaining agreement that puts more restrictions around when and how employers can terminate employees, but union membership in the US is low.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadHuge shoutout to the Imagineering team, their work is incredible!
Unfortunately for many people, because things like this just show companies that they can (even) treat high-tech employees like disposable items and get away with it. The right reaction would be to make sure that no one in your division EVER goes back to this company and prevents everyone in their close circle to start working there, unless they pay some really nice and big severance package.
I wonder if this is more related to "game development". This isn't game development but it is kinda related. Perhaps people just think differently there and the normal employer - employee separation of concerns just goes out of the window. An employer collects HUGE profits from your work in the IT sector, no matter your level. You, as an employee, sacrifice these profits for convenience, essentially. Now they take your convenience away and you still want to work there. It's kinda baffling to me. And the game industry always spat on engineers, probably because too many people "want" to do it.
Therefore I've banned the account. If that ever changes, you're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com and let us know. In the meantime, please stop creating accounts to break HN's rules with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Seems to incentivize getting rid of people when they need healthcare the most (eg "I have cancer" -> "Look, we're going to have to let you go, your performance the past few months hasn't been up to scratch"). I assume there'd be a bunch of health related after-effects to jobloss too, particularly around mental well-being.
Then, you get the coronavirus. Pretty bad. You’re young, so you live through it, but those days on a ventilator weren’t cheap. But unfortunately for you, the ambulance driver took you to one of those hospitals that sues its patients for non-payment. You should have told them to take you to a different hospital as you were gasping for breath.
In any case, you now have a medical debt of $40000 for a week or two of ICU. You have to file for bankruptcy. Unfortunately you’re young, so you’re barely into the principal on the house. So that’s gone.
Luckily, you still have your car. At least you can get to interviews for the few jobs left in the recession. But it’s sure hard to show up looking clean without a shower. At least now, you’re eligible for public insurance.
Up to eighty percent of people on ventilators die to Coronavirus die. (This percentage is so shockingly bad that some doctors are doing all they can to avoid or delay using them.)
Most who need ventilators for Coronavirus are older and have other health issues already.
As someone in a high risk category due to being medically handicapped, I will suggest that a lot of those people aren't hale and hardy enough to have a good job with good benefits. I've done freelance work for years.
Though, yes, it's true: In spite of the "all homeless are junkies and crazies" meme, serious health problems and their cost are a significant contributor to people ending up homeless in the US. Another major piece is our lack of appropriate housing options.
In addition to fixing healthcare, the US desperately needs to fix it's housing issues.
Upon passage of the CARES act, everyone that loses their job due to COVID is eligible for UI, and the federal UI is now $600/week, on top of the existing state UI. So in the state of California, an ex-Disney employee would receive $4200/month[1].
If you're single, $4200/month in California will more than pay for rent + health insurance + food.
If you're a working couple, together you will receive $8400/month.
[1] https://imgur.com/a/AifRmdD
However, when you get sick that rate doesn’t go up, so there’s no incentive from your employers standpoint to fire you when sick. Because of the “losing coverage” part it’s still extra shitty when they double up (cancer plus being fired sounds pretty awful).
Obamacare notably created markets for folks not receiving health insurance through work to purchase it directly (in addition to subsidies for low to middle income folks to do so, and several regulatory changes around other parts of the system), but that basic system wasn’t fundamentally altered and has been more or less how the US has done things since world war 2.
Fun bonus fact, employer based insurance was first offered as a workaround for world war 2 era wage controls.
except that if you get a severe illness and can't come to work, they can fire you for that
This means there could be a strictly financial incentive to dismiss a sick employee. This is of course entirely illegal if that were the purpose. [1] https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/benefits/pa...
Plus, its tax incentivized in three different ways.
- The employer can deduct it as a business expense, reducing corporate profits on which they have to pay income tax. In fairness, wages work the same way...
- ...but! The employer doesn't have to pay payroll tax on the amount it adds to their payroll.
- And while the employer puts it on the employee's W2, it doesn't contribute to their taxable income.
Dodging two kinds of income tax and payroll tax means that it works out to be way cheaper for a company to buy health insurance for their employees than it would be to raise their employees pay enough that they could buy the same insurance themselves, and that's before the company leverages its purchasing power to get good deals from insurance companies. It's an absurdly strongly incentivized system.
Doesn't seem unlikely to me, once you have enough employees, average cost per employee ends up being about the population average, skewed heavily by the fact that the company isn't employing very many people past retirement age where so much of total medical expense lies. Profit margins for health insurance companies aren't very high, so after administrative costs, what the average person/company pays in healthcare insurance is about what the average person accrues to their insurance in healthcare costs.
> Also, payroll taxes themselves are also deductible.
Shifting compensation to untaxed benefits brings the savings from corp_tax_rate * payroll_tax_rate to payroll_tax_rate.
Sorry but that's just wrong. Most large employers and even many smaller shops "self-insure" meaning they are footing the bill. Your health insurance company is just a front/conduit/paper pusher. In those cases, it is your employer who is ultimately deciding your prescription is not in the formulary, your jaw surgery is cosmetic even though you suffer from chronic headaches, etc. It is also your employer who sees that employee number 438 is costing them >> 1M/yr in covered medical bills (cuz cancer). They have every incentive to suddenly realize you are not working out for entirely unrelated (and fake) reasons.
B. You can also be covered under your spouse's work plan. So losing your job doesn't necessarily cut you out completely.
C. A few years ago, we changed the law to make it possible to remain covered by your parents' healthcare up to age 26, even if you are married.
D. If you are old enough, there's Medicare. If you are poor enough, there's Medicaid.
If none of those situations apply, yup, it sucks big time. The high cost of COBRA makes that option an ugly joke for a lot of unemployed people who simply can't afford it.
The US should join the rest of the developed world and provide universal coverage.
Edit: For context, my father, ex husband, father-in-law and assorted other relatives were career military. I'm not anti military. I'm just trying to say "That's totes a good faith wild guess!"
I would do it too under those circumstances.
Also: https://www.militaryonesource.mil/financial-legal/legal/citi...
[1] https://github.com/skypher/montezuma/blob/master/README.txt
(this really isn't far from how Denmark is handling the crisis nationally -- freeze employment, have the government pay salaries, and do their best to have companies pick back up where they left off w/ the same workforce).
It's possible they know exactly what they're doing, are doing everybody a favor, and will just hire them again when everything opens back up.
I get that John is down, and I definitely don't have whatever insight led him to say "even if I'm lucky enough to return someday, other people won't be". From my understanding though, a huge portion of corporate around the stores and parks was furloughed because there's not much for them to do at home. Their healthcare is covered and kindness aside it doesn't make much sense for Disney to bleed money. But this wasn't a covert layoff — when things get back to speed Disney wants people back.
Edit: And furloughing the employees allows them to claim unemployment, so that the US government can absorb the impact rather than Disney. Not pretty, but rational in a time of stimulus.
It's a shame
They are freaked out and making any decision they can to stop the cash burn, if it’s a good idea or not.
There's a strange detail I learnt, if you're laid-off then COBRA still only helps you if your employer keeps the same plan (i.e if they switch to a high deductible plan, yours changes too).
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20200409030935/https://twitter.c...
I guess someone wants to get rid of this tweet thoroughly.
It seems to me that even if Disney earns 100 times that, their employees should not get more than the market rate.
You know - the staff that were there for you, building your empire when times were good. Now they are suffering and Disney is posting record income numbers.
You sound like one of the asshole, cut-throat managers who makes decisions like this. I hope people like you die in a fire.
Of course strong feelings arise with this subject matter, and doubly so during a crisis. But if you're commenting here, you need not to let that propel you into personal attack or verbal violence. Maybe you don't owe corporate apologists or Disney executives better, but you owe this community better if you're posting here (much better).
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's also not in your interest to post like this. It will appeal only to a subset of the readers who already agree with you, but alienate everyone else. In other words, the price you pay for the momentary relief of venting is that your comment discredits your own position, making the truth in it harder for others to perceive and actually driving them further away from you. That harms your cause.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I agree with your comment if it's a small business that struggles to make ends meet, but this is Disney. I do expect better from them.
If you wouldn't mind taking a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and using HN in the intended spirit, we'd appreciate it. It's understandable that temperatures rise and pots boil over, but we all need to control ourselves in those areas, or else we end up ruining this place.
So you don’t think attitudes like what trophycase was responding to, ruins this site? I’ve known more programmers leave this site because of ugly attitudes worded civilly and so left unchecked, than because of responses like the one you’re complaining about. I think you’re threatening to ban the wrong people.
The moderators are not here to improve the conversation. They are not here to contribute. They do not have interesting things to say. They are here to remove things and people which offend them.
That doesn't follow, and I'd be careful about drawing such conclusions. It's difficult to reply meaningfully to general statements like those in your comment here, because they can actually be referring to a wide range of different things. I'd really need to see specific links.
In the case of the comment trophycase was responding to (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22820206), the fact that it was heavily downvoted already indicates a kind of community moderation, signalling that there's something objectionable about the post. The fact that I didn't reply with additional censure doesn't mean I somehow like the post or agree with it. It was a low-information comment with an ideological slant. But HN gets a huge number of those, from all ideological sides. If we were going to try to moderate all of them, first of all we couldn't because we'd be spending all our time doing nothing else, and second it would generate a massive backlash from users who don't agree that such comments clear the threshold for public scolding.
(The difference between that and "Ah yes. Hard decisions about whether the new CEO will wipe his ass with that 11 billion, or use it as fuel for his fireplace. Decisions, decisions." is pretty stark. Note also that I was responding to a repeated pattern.)
I'm by no means happy about such comments on HN, but there are limits, much harder limits than people assume, to what moderation power can achieve. Usually when people demand more from moderation, what they seem to want is for us to ban anyone who supports an ideology they disagree with. That's not an option for HN (even though we get accused of doing it all the time). It would kill the community, and I don't see what good that would do anyone.
There's a junior MBA somewhere bumping their career by destroying others'.
Having been through this stuff a couple times and heard these reactions before, I can tell you most people, esp those from blue chips, get picked up fast.
Covid changes things yes, but the system is not static. Response and handling of it will get better and better week by week as people learn and adapt. Companies will restart work and hiring sooner or later. Look at S.Korea. They got hit by MERS. They learnt, evolved new plans and this time around were prepared.
Yes, it is. People literally cannot leave their houses. There are certainty some online/100% remote jobs that will hire you via webcam, but most don't. And I'm saying that as a guy who has been 100% remote for the past 5+ years now. All, every single one, of my remote gigs had me show up and interview in person. That's just not an option for huge swaths of the US, and may not be for months yet.
> Response and handling of it will get better and better week by week as people learn and adapt. Companies will restart work and hiring sooner or later. Look at S.Korea. They got hit by MERS. They learnt, evolved new plans and this time around were prepared.
They're predicting as high as 50% of the local businesses failing in my city by the end of summer, and I've heard similar doom and gloom about other parts of N. America. S. Korea is an outlier in most respects, and there is little reason to believe that the responses put out by other nations will be as effective. The UK lagged on their COVID response and now their PM is in the ICU. Sweden just isn't doing anything, and it looks like Trump is trying to cause a civil war in the US by stealing resources from the states.
The worse is yet to come, IMO, and these former Disney workers are right to curse their employer.
> Any full-time or part-time worker who is furloughed, laid off or had their hours reduced due to the coronavirus is eligible for expanded unemployment benefits.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
My contract has a 3 month notice so unless I agree to anything else, I’d be paid 3 months regardless of whether the business is able to operate at all.
But I suppose that if my contract didn’t have that and I instead had a signing bonus or some other comp that gave me a few months of security then that would be equivalent.