This is looking 2001-dot-com-crash bad, but much, much faster.
It's worth remembering there are plenty of companies not laying people off, and "normal" will return eventually.
That said, I was watching The Big Short yesterday, and a line that I had noted before haunted me even more: "For every 1% unemployment goes up [in the USA], 40,000 people die".
Things might be different now in ways that now have a different impact, but if you want to feel better, there's evidence that the Great Depression did not cause an increase in people dying[1].
> Population health did not decline and indeed generally improved during the 4 years of the Great Depression, 1930–1933, with mortality decreasing for almost all ages, and life expectancy increasing by several years in males, females, whites, and nonwhites.
(Although, significantly, it does note that suicides increased, and another study found no increase in life expectancy, but no real change outside of suicides and car accidents.[2])
and the thing about suicides is, that the rates are really low compared to everything else... (even the flu... - at least in non-gun countries).
I think this is mainly fearmongering by the upper 0.1% seeing that now they might have to bear the "risk" they are always claiming to shoulder when taking in enormous returns on their capital... (e.g. in Germany currently most car-companies (BMW and VW are both largely family-owned) still pay their dividends, while their employees are getting unemployment benefits from the state...).
In the end history tells us, that people generally seem to prefer to stay alive however low the odds are. If this has significantly changed in the last 50 years, maybe we should think about what has changed that – I seriously doubt that a "let's go back to business" is the right approach in that case.
There is the coping hypothesis, that coping with unemployment causes unhealthy behavior and death [1] and the latent sickness hypothesis [2], that unhealthy behavior is a cause of both unemployment and death. Anecdotally it makes sense - if you are an alcoholic or drug addict you are likely to lose your job as well as die as a result of your behavior - but the actual number of people who die is ostensibly hard to measure.
I'm guessing there'll be a lesser need to cope this time around since a lot of people will know a lot of other people who are unemployed. All of a sudden being unemployed might be the new normal and we'll all help each other cope
Even if it's transient, I think you'll see a lot of companies use this situation as an excuse to clear the decks of what they perceive to be bad hires or underperforming employees that they'd otherwise let limp on in good times.
The Netherlands tested for antibodies in blood donor serum last week, preliminary result is that 3% of people have them. And not all of them show full immunity.
If we relax quarantine measures, the virus just comes back immediately. This is going to stay with us for years.
> Assessing the short term health impact of the Great Recession in the European Union: a cross-country panel analysis
> Results
> Overall, during the recent recession, an increase of one percentage point in the standardised unemployment rate has been associated with a statistically significant decrease in the following mortality rates: all-cause-mortality (3.4%), cardiovascular diseases (3.7%), cirrhosis- and chronic liver disease-related mortality (9.2%), motor vehicle accident-related mortality (11.5%), parasitic infection-related mortality (4.1%), but an increase in the suicide rate (34.1%). In general, the effects were more marked in countries with lower levels of social protection, compared to those with higher levels.
Conclusions
> An increase in the unemployment rate during the Great Recession has had a beneficial health effect on average across EU countries, except for suicide mortality. Social protection expenditures appear to help countries “smooth” the health response to a recession, limiting health damage but also forgoing potential health gains that could otherwise result.
That seems pretty disingenuous given that the Great Depression was the lynchpin for World War 2 which directly resulted in the deaths of 75 million people.
Of course ironically prosperity can be more dangerous dirtectly as risky "vices" like extreme sports and fast cars are expensive. The Kennedies tend to die doing activities restricted to or done far more often by the privledged.
Extreme sports may technically have a long term boost on life expextancy (from fitness) but short term would make a spike in accident deaths. I guess money is sort of the same way - better outcomes from affording healthcare but the temptation to take risks results in more immediate deaths.
Given that peopled art forced to stay at home with families, I am a little worried that other negative statistics are going to rise. I expect we will see an increase in divorces and abuses of various types. A lot of people need, but are not getting personal space.
I don't think this is dot-com-crash bad yet, if you mean that tech workers specifically are in dire straits. The major Bay Area employers like Google, FB, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, etc haven't had layoffs; it's mostly small startups. Some of the large companies are even outperforming currently (Amazon and Netflix are at all-time highs).
But if you mean dot-com-crash bad in terms of the economy in general crashing, oh man are you right. This is an economic free-fall for most of America.
You may be interested in the short-squeeze hypothesis, which suggests the current rally was triggered by technical factors and will soon peak and evaporate.
And the list is just startups, too - they're obviously more vulnerable in many ways to financial shocks than large companies, but large corporate layoffs are going to be where the big numbers are.
Yep. social gatherings / hospitality industry / gyms etc are banned, and anyone who can work from home is doing so, but you still can leave your house for "essential reasons", e.g. exercise, buying takeaway lunch every day. many retail stores and public transport are still functioning.
I think it's our
- low density
- government actually listening to scientists and reacting quickly and non-ideologically.
Density differences are overblown. No-one is catching coronavirus in the uninhabited deserts or cattle stations hours from the nearest town. They catch it in crowded public transport vehicles and in grocery stores.
The government responding quickly and non-ideologically is the number one reason why Australia is doing good and the rest of the west is doing so badly. Whether it's the ideology of freedom of travel or the ideology of the economy before health, it has hurt other nations whereas Australia's ideology of pragmatism (and our neverending experience with many other crises and disasters) has helped.
pragmatic in that a party with your 20 closest mates is probably, no definitely worth that $1000 fine? Could be a bit soon to be making grandiose rationalisations on the (abundant) benefits of the Australian gaze. there's a way to go yet.
Pff. Every country has people breaking the law. I never said Australians universally follow laws they expect to be enforced, but for that to be a big deal you would have to demonstrate people universally following laws they don't expect to be enforced in some other place. I tell you, it doesn't happen.
Leadership in the early days of the crisis made a huge difference. The early days of the crisis now are passed us, so whatever happens next it is about perseverance - a completely different matter and something a country does not excel at if it goes through prime minister faster than a pub goes through sixpacks.
Yes, yes. Tho I guess it totally depends on your definition of leadership. IMO the handling has been pretty average.
I could make a list, but I won't. Instead I'll focus on the positives and note that the one commendable thing that the federal government has done in this crisis is to reach deep into their mothballed hip-pocket and squeeze out a few billion pineapples.
I fully appreciate how hard that must have been, given their fixation on 'the black'. And all with only half a whinge.
For real? Morrison’s response to this has been lacking in its effectiveness and treacle-like in its speed. Up until a few weeks ago he was saying that people shouldn’t stop going to football games, and up until teachers put their foot down and in spite of health professions advice and common sense he thought keeping schools open indefinitely and as a fine idea.
low density yes. tho would argue each politician is finger-dancing to the beat of their own belly-gurgles. not quite trump/cuomo levels of disfunction, but trendy-curves aside, messaging here definitely lacks some cohesion.
What's it actually like there? It sounds like you're under strict lockdown but everyone seems to be saying the government is doing a terrible job (even though the test positive rate is low and the relative number of cases, even the absolute number of cases, is low). Here you say the economy is still humming along but other people say there's queues outside of Centrelink and down the street and around the corner.
Are shops like Bunnings and Big W still open? Bike shops? Hobby stores? Gift shops? These are considered non essential here in Germany some of which has caused me difficulty and some of which have not (somewhere may be non essential this week, but over a long enough period of time, everywhere is essential; we just moved a fortnight before the lockdown and fortunately I bought the things I needed for a new home just before they were shut down as non-essential).
Restaurants I gather are closed to in house meals same as here. But same as here they're open for takeaway.
Factories and such businesses were closed in Italy, but I don't think they were shut down here.
Cinemas I take it are closed. Prisons in Victoria at least do not accept inperson visitors which causes prisoners severe isolation but is obviously better then getting them all infected. I understand prisoners are still working - if they're isolated and healthy I guess there's no reason to stop them from working.
Most retail shops are closed. A lot of restaurants and cafes are closed. All events cancelled. So there's a lot of casuals / partimers who don't have any work anymore.
Bunnings, BigW, Kmart, all supermarkets are open with social distancing and limiting people in the store. Not sure a bout bike stores. Hobbyco in QVB is still open. A lot of stores closed their retail but are still doing online orders.
Basically Australia uses a combination of blacklist and a whitelist system. Some places where people gather like gyms and pubs are forced to close, and restaurants are forced to takeaway-only. You also have a whitelist on reasons to come outside of your home, which still include work.
My company was good - we spend a week preparing and now almost everyone is working from home, which is probably unusual considering we work in embedded systems. I have several boxes of hardware in my room with me now.
Open and doing roaring business from what I can tell. Took my mountain bike to get serviced and my mechanic said he’s far busier than he anticipated and it’d be over a week before he could even get to my bike.
Just to clarify, the guy below said he lives in Sydney and retail is closed, but in Melbourne the corona cases density seems a bit less than Sydney.
Most of our retail is still open, for example Target, Kmart, most coffee shops are still open doing takeaway and I can still go to JB HiFi, BBC shop, book shop, EB Games etc. So it seems like not a lot has changed regarding my current lifestyle except working from home.
Gyms, Massage, Casinos, Pubs, Clubs etc. that you’d expect to spread the virus really quickly are all closed.
In Poland you get fuck all. Government kept promising 40% contribution but doesn't say where you're supposed to find the other 60% from. So companies are letting go of people left and right.
Sweden too, but government "only" pays 60% IIRC. Employer pays the rest but there has also been some ease on how much tax an employer has to pay for each employee.
But it's doubtful how long they can keep that up for. Some months, sure. But not years, and the virus is going to stick around for a while. I think it's just a delay.
It strikes me as a good play, if we were living in times that were normal.
Take 2019 for instance. If that scheme existed then, without any pandemic, it would be a great way to soften the exit and allow folks time to find new jobs.
But the world we're in now, not so much. It's pulling the band-aid off slower, and my take is, waiting for a hail-mary play when someone magically comes up with a solution for this problem.
My interpretation of all of this waves hand around at world leaders is that they genuinely believe science and technology work like magic, and will come up with something, soon.
What I don't quite understand is why startups who either just received funding or companies who were doing reasonably well decide to do mass layoffs during economic downturns? I mean they provide $reasons but I have a hard time taking them at face value.
- A lot if them are not profitable.
- They don't know how long this will last.
- Many planned on growing into profitability over n months and expected they could raise more money if needed.
- Now, there is no growth for many and contractions.
- Investment money is drying up
- they might not have 2 years at their current burn rate to get to profitable status.
In the end, it can be about survival. Their pre coronavirus burn rates are not sustainable. Of course, for some, it is also a continent way to shed staff who appear to be underperforming, freeze raises, and ask more of their employees.
For many (even unicornish) startups the funding is released in tranches, usually tied to certain performance metrics. With drastically reduced revenue, new customer flow all dried up, and even marketing result graphs simulating nosedives, there aren't that many milestones you could hit.
If [enough] performance milestones are missed, company's next batch of on-paper funding pot may not be released.
Non-essential demand has been down and even those who are essential suffer from a logistical hellscape. Unless you are involved with COVID mitigation directly now is not the time to attempt growth. Even those which service those stuck at home have to suffer from the rest of the economy collapsing. Advertising rates are in the toliet because they can't do much good to bring in sales.
Are they seriously listing down emails and mobile numbers of the people layed off? Is there no privacy concern here or am I missing the bigger picture?
I don't really understand that either. My best guess is potential employers can contact them directly? Still I would put a layer in between, i.e. LinkedIn.
I have a fairly rare surname, but have {surname} at gmail, so I get a lot of "spam" from companies that sign me up before verifying if the user inputting my email is the person owning the email.
In the most egregious/spammy cases I'm gonna find some higher-up emails and sign them up for their own services in hopes that the practice will stop.
How would you characterize the quality of CircleCI? I've spent quite a few hours trying to work out mysterious bugs in a build process that runs fine locally. This morning the web ui was full of 'client error' messages.
As an end user I've been pretty happy with it. I've used Jenkins, Travis, Github and Circle mostly, and of those I hope to never have to use Travis or Jenkins again, and I've only really used Github for some simple stuff, but rather enjoyed the experience.
Circle however I've used with some fairly lengthy and complex build processes involving multiple parallel builds of Rails apps during upgrades and it's handled the workflow well.
I think they've improved the UI a bit recently, but it's still pretty complex though.
We've seen great results since switching from Circle to Buildkite, not the least of which is cost, but you have to be willing to do a little bit of your own IT work.
But isn't that the point of Circle...not having to do any IT work? At some point the cost of Circle becomes negligible, especially when you consider how much your time is worth...and that you don't have to do any maintenance.
Yes, if you are completely allergic to IT work, then your options are more limited. In terms of time, I would say the initial setup cost us a day or two, but after that our EC2 build box has just been fire and forget.
edit: I'll also add that in terms of time, I feel like most of the time in build pipelines is actually spent in tweaking, adding, and modifying the build configs, as opposed to the servers themselves (and you might also value developer time differently from devops time). I have found Buildkite easier to work with than CircleCI in this regard, and thus saved much more time overall.
You might be interested in what I'm building over at https://boxci.dev
The motivation for this was exactly this problem. With Box CI your local build is your CI build because it runs jobs via agents on your own hardware so you can very easily debug / understand what is going on.
Wow, that looks so practical ! And no server cost/setup/maintenance, I guess.
The thing I'm concerned about that doesn't seem addressed on your home page is security : by installing your agent on my machine, I'm basically giving you access to my machine non-stop, no ? What guarantees do I have that your agent can't be used as a backdoor ?
Firstly, and very importantly, the agent is open source (https://github.com/boxci/boxci) so you can see exactly what it does and even build it from source if you want. I should mention Box CI isn't launched yet, everything is still in beta including the agent.
The Box CI service doesn't have any way to send requests to or send commands to agents - the requests are one-way, agent to service only, with agents polling the service for build jobs to run, running them, and sending logs and results to the service.
Build scripts and configuration are all in your source code. This is a tradeoff, because it definitely means you have to trust your source (and everyone committing to it) if you're going to be running agents on your dev machine for instance.
There are obviously mitigations to this though, like running the agents on a dedicated Cloud VM with nothing on the filesystem and internet access locked down to package manager and cloud provider hosts. A future plan is to provide pre-configured VMs for various cloud providers so this can be set up in a few clicks for low cost ($20 a month or whatever a reasonable build machine VM would cost).
The real security point of the the agents though, the other side of these tradeoffs, is that your code and your production secrets never leave hardware you control - the CI service never has access to them. That's a massive security advantage Vs centralised CI services which do have full read access to your source and effectively full write access to your production infrastructure via keys you give them - compared to what I've described above this is a massively bigger and more dangerous potential security hole.
You can probably tell by the length of this comment I'm super interested in this aspect (along with dev experience I see it as the key advantage of the model and one of the reasons I'm building it) there's a lot more depth to this and if you'd like to discuss further, I'd love to :-) Email's in my profile.
Neat! I love the model of giving powerful CI tools directly to the user. I ended up with a similar solution for my personal projects: a private bors-style CI GitHub bot, written from scratch, running on my own hardware, that I control via GitHub comments (the bot ignores comments from other users).
It's quite spartan, but it gets the job done, and I love that a) it's fast, b) I can see exactly what happened, down to ssh'ing into the build directory and poking around, and c) If there's a feature I want, I can just add it!
Very cool - yeah I know exactly what you mean, running CI workflows on your own machine is just so nice.
When something fails it makes the debug and retry loop just as simple and fast as when you're developing, and there's really nothing like watching a production build run and ship in literally like a minute, just as fast as if you're building and starting your local dev server :-)
Guess they might just be using Covid as an excuse to get rid of some people? Wouldn't be ethical, but wouldn't be surprised if some companies took advantage of the situation.
> Wouldn't be ethical, but wouldn't be surprised if some companies took advantage of the situation.
I know for the fact that few US, Indian firms with offices in India are just using this as an excuse to trim their workforce, enforce paycuts (upto 50%), hold back increments for the year (and even next) and restructure salaries drastically - by moving almost 60% to vaiable pay(which typically never gets paid).
Traditional BigCo ITeS/outsourcing shops are using this as a great opportunity to trim the flab in the middle (claiming as "a dire measure to sustain shareholder value") while it was always about . These are the same bunch in middle-management whom they would pamper regularly by giving quarterly/monthly awards (quarterly Gem, Spot awards, Player of the month, etc bullshit accolades)
And the markets also work that way. On a regular day, if there's firing, stocks of a BigCo go wonky sensing something is amiss. During a crisis, if they do not fire people by the thousands, markets deem it as lack of financial prudence and stocks go down.
Everything (and anything) in the name of profits and shareholder value. There's a saying dated thousands of years, goes like "vyaparam droha chintanam” meaning "Business is all about profits most often via undue advantages".
Our experience with Indian firms during COVID has been rocky.
Most of the big firms (Tata, CTS, CapGemini) have big offices or call centers, with VPNs or private connections to western infrastructure -- otherwise you would have random Indian IPs logging into your systems, and that would make my security team lose their minds.
But with COVID they can't congregate in those offices, and the logistics of getting additional VPNs, working around geo-fencing, and the fact that some of the admins don't have internet at home means they're not able to support anything.
The handful of Filipino and Mexican offshore talent has been more successful in that regard. Mexican talent in particular has been pretty good -- more expensive than Indian hires, but generally more qualified with overlap of US timezones.
> some of the admins don't have internet at home means they're not able to support anything
Yes, this is the reality. Most of these shops do not believe in issuing a laptop along with a secure connectivity option, simply because they deem all of that as a sap on procurements.
And they still use shitty 2005 era desktop since work gets done on VDIs (citing info sec and DLP) and desktops are mere dumb terminals. But even to operate those dumb terminals, they are ready to spend cost on electricity and logistics but will actively avoid issuing good equipment just to avoid cost on licenses and manageability.
And the lack of good tools and beefy desktop machines is precisely why they cannot grep the code themselves, which is why those outsourced coders will fail unless you micro-manage them with design specifications.
Living in Singapore, I met some people who trained India and then used their own good equipment and their productivity was on par with US or EU employees. I was also unfortunate enough to manage some people using '95 equipment, and they were basically dead weights for the project.
> big offices or call centers, with VPNs or private connections to western infrastructure
I used to work on a product with a web console. One of the things we designed and planned for was a login storm around 9-10 AM on Monday in pick-a-timezone where 200 users log in from the same IP. If you ignore the seasonality, it looks a bit like an attack.
Can you expand a bit more on this, how can they let go without severance? How big was the loss? Was it contractors?
I'm in the final stages interviews and up until now have generally been looking forward to the prospect of working there. This is troubling. Thanks in advance.
Can we communicate over a private channel? Can share more. Wasn't contractors; was employees. Indeed.
If we can't, my advice to you is to backchannel. See if you have a friend of a friend's who works there, reach out to people via LinkedIn whom you didn't interview with, or find former employees, they will tell you the real story...
There's nothing to say the two events are correlated. As far as we can tell, they could have been underperforming sales people who were let go. Hiring/firing is _not_ based off the single criteria of raising money. There are complex business decisions between events like this, regardless of the coin in the coffers.
I must admit, I get this feeling from using the product over the last 2 years. I moved us over from Jenkins to CircleCI and while on the whole it was positive, we’ve had a lot of issues and the product has failed to live up to some of the promises made in our trial period.
We basically just hit hard edges and missing features very quickly, and what’s there is good, but not great.
Each bit of the product feels good, but it feels like there’s a lack of direction, product thinking, understanding users, or something at a fundamental level that is causing friction.
I have a friend who worked there a few years ago and from her experience it sounds like there are some good engineers, but some careless decisions being made.
Although lots of UK companies won't be making any redundancies until the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme ends. It's much easier to put UK workers on the 80% pay furlough scheme than firing them. As soon as that money dries up expect companies to make lots of mass redundancies. It's going to be interesting to see the UK government's exit strategy from this crisis, immediately terminating the scheme before the economy has recovered will result in a huge increase in unemployment but keeping the scheme means productivity won't recover as people able to work productively are sat at home doing nothing.
Keeping the scheme is also going to blow a massive hole in the budget. That said, Brexit will likely give them more room to fire up the pound printing presses to paper over the gap.
> but keeping the scheme means productivity won't recover as people able to work productively are sat at home doing nothing.
Productivity will recover when businesses can use resources productively. It's either keep the scheme running until quarantine measures are reduced enough to allow businesses to start ramping back up and productivity increases again, or remove the scheme and push people to unemployment which is worse for productivity. If the government is daft enough to stop the scheme before the quarantine measures are reduced we're in for a shit-show of a decade.
This depends on which is worse for productivity: unemployment or furlough. I think in some cases furlough is worse for productivity as workers that could be working for another employer and have in-demand skills are sitting idle. In a free-market devoid of minimum wages and government packages, wages would be going down massively but fewer people would be doing nothing.
For companies letting go more than 100 people, there is a mandatory consultation period of 45 days, and 30 days for more than 20. There was actually a story a few days ago that this scheme needed to be extended soon or some employers would be legally obliged to start that process. Not sure if that happened yet.
What's particularly interesting is that to make people redundant you have to notify them 6 weeks before. And 6 weeks before the end of the government guaranteed furlough period is ... today.
Mandatory consulting period for UK redundancies is 30 days or 45 days for larger employers - while some may have started it won't be hitting yet. It's the small companies to watch out for; can't have a consultation if you're insolvent.
I suspect many will not bother with consulting periods given the circumstances. It opens them to possible tribunal action, but rulings and penalties are usually mild, tribunals take ages to go through, and very few people bother or even know that you have to start the process within 3 months.
(If morbidly curious, you can keep an eye on tribunal outcomes at https://www.gov.uk/employment-tribunal-decisions .. I just checked this month's unfair dismissal outcomes and not a single one was in the complainant's favour, though some may have been withdrawn due to negotiating an offer.)
Not really. I'm tempted to write something to slowly scrape them all to find them though. I once found one about a fist fight(!) at a barbershop and the person who started the fight took the employer to a tribunal and lost.
In some companies it feels like they are firing the people that they could not easily get rid of otherwise - cutting of the bottom 25% of staff (based on low performance reviews or personal grudges).
Statistically-speaking, this will disproportionately effect women and minorities (low performance reviews !necessarily= low performance when implicit bias is present, which again, statistically-speaking, it is). Certainly these times suck for everyone, but there go the careers of black, brown, and female millennials with yet another black mark on their CVs before they've hit their 40s.
I seriously doubt whether this will disproportionately effect women and minorities. Certainly not women, as it is pretty hard to change the male/female birth ratio. It might affect them though.
I'm sorry but I (as a minority myself) genuinely feel a little bit insulted by your assumption that minorities score worst in performance test. There's no basis for that belief, a part from your personal biases and they are shockingly regressive even if well intentioned. Are you yourself a minority?
I think they meant manager and peer evaluation, not standardized aptitude testing. Though on that note, I know someone who creates those standardized employment apptitude tests and checking the test for minority group biases is part of their validation, I believe so the company has something to point to if they need to defend the test later. It's apparently easy to start measuing things other than apptitude and veer into cultural or economic influences.
Okay thanks for the clarification, but still if anything I find the tech sector to be one of the industry with the least amount of racial prejudice even in promotions. I totally understand that personal experiences can be different and are still valid, but I think the data tells us that there isn't any widespread systemic racism in tech. The proportion of people of color in C level exec/higher management levels is huge and the efforts made to increase diversity have been intense. I just don't see how that could happen if lower performance reviews were generally biased against us.
> His point is accurate if you include asians as a minority group.
No, it's not. Even if they were favored, one racial minority group being favored and others being disfavored doesn't balance out to “no racism”, it's even more racism than the latter being disfavored alone. And even if there is no evidence of racism in either direction affecting Asians, that doesn't negate racism affecting other groups.
At best it might be accurate of you only look at Asians.
What about the much higher numbers of indians (especially in C level executive positions) in tech? Or Arabs? Transgenders? Neurodivergents? Iranians? Muslims?
What's the line here? At what point would tech not be racist? I really don't see your point here. There is a lot of evidence pointing to a really diverse, generally progressive industry with, if anything, a higher over representation (compared to the population) of multiple minority groups, different gender identities and a much more inclusivity conscious mindset than probably any other industry. We have no data that really points to the opposite conclusion. Again, at what point would you not say that those are all exceptions?
While that's a false comparison (there aren't lots of people trying to support their families by becoming my friend), bubbles are very real. Communities tend to be racially segregated and that leads to prejudice and discrimination.
Please be a little more receptive to stuff like this. Racism and sexism are social ills that affect the majority of people. It's worth your time to having a passing understanding of the major concepts.
> What about the much higher numbers of indians (especially in C level executive positions) in tech? Or Arabs?
What about them? (Mostly, what both of those show is what the structure of the immigration system favors for nationalities where there aren't lots of people who are eligible for family-based immigration.)
> Transgenders?
Mostly reflects that people of higher socioeconomic status and in social environments concentrated on particular geographic locations are more likely to primed to accept.(or, viewed another way, less strongly conditioned to deny) transgender identity, and that both of those correlate with onramps to the tech field. Not that that is germane in any way to racism since gender identity isn't a race/ethnicity.
> Neurodivergents?
Also aren't a race/ethnicity and so aren't germane.
> Iranians?
See above notes about Indians and Arabs.
> Muslims?
Aren't a race, but also see above notes about Arabs and Iranians (which apply to lots of other places where Muslim immigrants come from.)
> At what point would tech not be racist?
I never said tech was racist, I said that “some races are overrepresented” isn't counterevidence to racism but, absent evidence for some other explanation for the overrepresentation, supporting evidence.
But, that aside, obviously, at the point where no one was systematically disadvantaged in the field on the basis of their race.
> There is a lot of evidence pointing to a really diverse, generally progressive industry
No, there's not. There's a lot of evidence of an industry drawing principally from a narrow domestic racial and class pool, that on non-racial/class grounds overrepresents groups overrepresented in that pool, and which in addition to that domestic pool overepresents immigrants to the US on non-family bases because being in the industry is itself highly advantageous to employment-based entry into the US.
The absence of certain types of bias does not preclude nor excuse the existence of other types.
>There is a lot of evidence pointing to a really diverse, generally progressive industry with, if anything, a higher over representation (compared to the population) of multiple minority groups, different gender identities and a much more inclusivity conscious mindset than probably any other industry.
That is not true. Retail, labor, non-tech administration are good examples to the contrary. The difference in pay and prestige is telling.
This is also the time that th underprivileged would get exploited more.
Work permit/visa holders will see an increase in workload (with a "work-more-or-eff-off" note, along with possibly a paycut too) Even pay negotiations on open offers, making it seem generous tha offer doesn't get cancelled.
Personally know a couple of friends who are in the US (with H1Bs awaitng transfer/extensions) facing this particular situation now.
Hiring is fucked. Tech hiring and ex\mployment more so.
Seems every employer treats employees as though the wage slaves are just so, or just above hamsters on wheels doing tricks.
Work permit workers (H1, OPT and L1-B in increasing order) are the worst exploited and least privileged sub group of the entire tech workforce.
Be it an upcoming economy with a flood of opportunities like we saw for the past 7 years or a downturn, like the one we are witnessing now, visa workers will be exploited no matter what.
They are not cheaper than non visa-dependent hires, but they are abundant, easy to hire, easy to fire, easy to replace, incredibly easy to bully, pressurize and basically exploit. The only barrier to total exploitation is the manager's own conscience and values. And we all know, values are easily compromised when it can help the bottom line.
Would seem so on the face of it, but measuring performance is not trivial, and some people can be essential for reasons unrelated to performance (or their real performance isn't accurately measured, however you want to see it).
From an anonymous employee I know: SimilarWeb fired 10% of their workforce - mostly sales engineers and sales people they recently hired and cancelled their holiday bonuses.
They are the technical person on the sales team. They do demo's, field technical questions, might do a POC with a potential customer, so on. They also get a commission but they traditionally have a standard salary as well instead of the sales rep where their salary might be 60% or more commission only.
Yeah generally not directly anymore. Many come from a software engineer background though and find the sales side of things interesting. The money can be better than a Dev at a company that is doing well too.
Some places call them Solution Architects too which IMO is a better name as they work with customers to help them see how their company solutions can be integrated and made useful.
the ones that i know are former engineers. they also have excellent verbal skills and seem to be the smartest people in the room. may or may not be the best coders — i don’t know — but they are very impressive in person.
When was the last time a person with the title engineer was an actual engineer? Even software engineers are usually just programmers, sometimes senior sometimes not. Hence my question.
I think you can usually tell what someone is not by looking at their job title. The last word tells you what they're not (except for those management positions where they do it backwards and say "vice president communications" - in those cases any parsable subcomponent of the name tells you what they are not; a vp comms can neither communicate nor are they a vp).
Given that nowadays it's common for current and former employers(I know you're reading this, Wiktor) to track our social media presence I wouldn't be surprised if that already happened.
Can someone please change the title of this - just as with other similar posts - to use "laid-off" instead of "fired"? Regardless of how loose some may be with language, there's a clear distinction between these terms.
Given that there are non-US readers here, maybe there's another pair of phrases that Hacker News could use as standard in this situation. I know in the UK, "made redundant" is used instead of "laid-off".
We've been penalizing these threads but I'm kind of changing my mind about that (other than that we don't want them very often because repetition is not good for the front page). Unfortunately they tend to devolve into junk, so there's more of a moderation burden.
Edit: this thread ended up making a poor case for having threads like this on HN. Most of it was off topic, and a lot of it went into low-quality rage and even outright flamewar.
I know in the UK, "made redundant" is used instead of "laid-off".
Yes, though most Brits would pragmatically accept the term "laid-off" as covering redundancy, though formally a "lay-off" is the same as furloughing in the UK (i.e. not permanent).
This is just grammatical nitpicking. People are not working in company X any more against their will. One can call it "removing", "laying off", "dismissing", "number cutting" or whatever corporate BS speak says is correct these days, but reality is that they're fired.
Not sure about nuances in English language but in Swedish there is a very important distinction. You are fired for stealing at work, hitting your manager or neglecting safety precautions etc. You are laid off for economical reasons, when the company can not afford to keep you around. The former reflects bad on you, the latter is not due to you. I think it is important to maintain the distinction.
Your article actually makes a different distinction to the one you intended:
> There is a difference between being laid off and fired.
> Generally, we treat your job loss as a layoff if your employer is not replacing you, and you'll qualify for unemployment benefits if you meet all of the eligibility criteria.
> If your employer is replacing you, we generally will treat you as being fired.
Some companies here are firing people so that they can replace them with people willing to work at a lower salary.
The article also allows the concept of no-fault firing:
> If you were fired through no fault of your own, such as not having the skills to do the job, you may be eligible for unemployment benefits.
So I think from a dictionary definition, it's an OK title; from an emotional perspective, I can understand how someone telling you that you were fired can be jarring.
However, we should remember that the shame is placed squarely on the shoulders of the company - in any case of firing, the company can always be seen as partially at fault, as it is usually caused by lack of forward thinking, agility, engagement or empathy.
So remember: Whether they laid you off or fired you, it is our job as a community to stand with you.
> to take exercise either alone or with other members of their household;
There is nothing in that law that restricts either the number of times you can do that or the amount of time you can spend doing that. There _has_ been guidance issued by various people in government and law enforcement agencies, but that is exactly what it is: guidance. According to the law, you are free to take exercise either alone or with other members of their household, and the law doesn't care how often you do that or for how long.
This is not true, the guidance is:
"one form of exercise a day, for example a run, walk, or cycle - alone or with members of your household"
There is no time limit on how long you can be out exercising for.
It's not in law, but it was advised by Michael Gove[1]: "I would have thought for most people a walk of up to an hour, a run of 30 minutes or a cycle ride of between that, depending on their level of fitness, is appropriate."
I guess ultimately it's up to the individual - the longer you exercise for and the greater the area you cover, I guess the higher the risk of you spreading the virus if you have it or getting it is. But I think the government are crediting people with some common sense here, e.g. if you are in the middle of nowhere and don't see another person, you can probably justify exercising for longer to yourself more easily than in a crowded city.
FWIW, I've been doing about 30 mins cycling outside most week days in London, around an hour (sometimes 90 minutes) at the weekend. Would love to go further or more times a day, but feels like we have to do our bit to help, while also staying sane, personally I feel comfortable with this level.
Before the covid19 my plan was to leave and a have summer off. Now it has changed, but I still wouldn't mind to be laid-off. It'd be less exciting break but a break nevertheless.
Lightbend WAS a vendor to a lot of companies that were affected by COVID-19 related layoffs. Some of these companies like Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings are part of industries that are virtually nonexistent right now. Some of those companies are also based in Europe like SwissCom and UniCredit. The shutdown of our borders has made it difficult to maintain the same roles they were originally contracted to fill, resulting in cancelled contracts. Not as much fishy as it is obvious to me that lost/cancelled contracts equals less money to pay employees. Less money === less jobs.
a quote i remembered from twitter: "This is the best time to get rid of employees".
a startup based in London just fired 10% of their workforce.
all were given two options: government's furlough scheme where the state pays 80% of the salary, or outright dismissal. interestingly, half chose to quit.
It's definitely not easy, more candidates on the market -> higher competiton. As a side note, furlough only covers up to a certain salary level (2500 pounds I think).
I don't know about other sides of IT, but as a data engineer in London I'm getting daily messages from recruiters offering contract/permanent positions. All the big companies are also hiring. So if you have a certain level of seniority I can imagine it's easier to land a new job now.
For a bit of context, at London startup the furlough scheme is very unlikely to be 80% of their salary because it is capped at 30k per year pre-tax/80% of your salary whichever is lower.
That said, I'm surprised half of people turned down 2k/month to job hunt.
London developers do not get paid well vs cost of living. I interviewed for a city based senior data engineer role at a large insurer and was supprised that they choked at 45K basic not much package.
Generally uk dev pay is very bad compared to US or even other Europe.
Contract work used to be basically the only way to make good money but this has now been nobbled. Not a good city to work in.
As a result permie developers generally don't have a huge amount of a savings.
I was able to get Senior at £74k in London. Nothing to sneeze at in principle, save for the London cost of living.
Moved to New York following Brexit, now making literally twice that. (Paying twice that for housing, too, but my housing is more like 15 minutes from work instead of 60 and I have a real subway option instead of putting up with Southern Rail and the strikes.)
You're talking about universal credit which yes you won't qualify for with greater than 16k savings (pension savings or HTB ISA are however are excluded).
Shit all. New style JSA is £74.35 a week plus you could also potentially claim Universal Credit (if you've got under £16k savings) which is £94. £730 or so a month is not enough to live on if you're having to pay for your accommodation in most of the south.
If my LinkedIn messages are anything to go by, there's still quite a few companies hiring tech workers in London at the moment. So I imagine many of these people would be quite confident finding a new job.
you need to bear in mind that the government's furlough scheme is capped (gross £2.5k per month) and it has an expiry date. this means that in such a situation, you can't assume you'll be on furlough until "normality resumes". even if the government extends the scheme, the company can still fire you and opt for not having you on furlough or not. overall furlough is as uncertain as it gets. on the other hand, dismissal might come with a "severance package".
Right of course if you have a severance package on the table you need to weigh that against the expected payout across your expected out of work period but in this climate I'm not convinced you can safely estimate that out of work period as short.
Under UK employment laws, you can't just force your staff to take a 20% pay cut without their consent, even if you're using the furlough scheme. And as others have pointed out, it may have been more than 20% in practice, if it was based on the furlough scheme where a cap applies. A lot of places that are genuinely up against it because of the virus are asking staff to take that hit voluntarily to help protect the business and their jobs, but that's different.
If you make them redundant instead then you must give them a redundancy payment as well. However, this only protects employees after two years and in any case it's capped at a low level relative to typical salaries in fields like tech, so this might not have been worth much to the staff at a startup. Many employers do offer more than this voluntarily, but I wouldn't necessarily assume any startup did.
Maybe the staff who chose to leave were more concerned about the future viability of the business, an extended pause in their career development, or both. Or maybe they really were offered voluntary redundancy on favourable terms.
Curiously, just yesterday the UK government announced some new measures aimed directly at supporting startups, particularly tech startups in their early stages that aren't yet making money. Apparently at least someone in government recognises the business model and feels it will be better to protect that part of our economy during the downturn, which is a remarkably enlightened view given how badly successive governments in the UK have treated small businesses in the past.
Yeah lots of people aren't aware that you can refuse the UK furlough scheme. The company can then fire you but you could then take them to an employment tribunal and sue for unfair dismissal. At certain companies that are using furlough as an excuse to increase profits rather than to prevent job losses then you would probably win your case.
Although obviously you should consult with a proper employment lawyer.
As I understand it, most employment lawyers are advising clients to follow the same processes as they would for redundancy in selecting staff to be furloughed etc. This ensures that if an employee does decline then proper records will have been kept and proper processes followed to make them redundant in the normal way. Given that the explicit intent of the furlough scheme is to provide an alternative for employers who would otherwise have to make staff redundant, this doesn't seem unreasonable.
Obviously this means employers who are abusing the system to try to force a pay cut on people or fire them by the back door when they weren't genuinely redundant may be out of luck. I'm not sure anyone is going to have much sympathy for employers doing that, though.
>Curiously, just yesterday the UK government announced some new measures aimed directly at supporting startups, particularly tech startups in their early stages that aren't yet making money
Do you have a link about this please? Hadn't heard of it until now
I'm not sure the full details have been published yet. It was mentioned in the usual round of news reports last night, so I assume it was announced as part of one of the set pieces yesterday.
It sounds like some sort of investment-matching scheme, where the existing investors have to put more money in to keep the business viable but the government will then make some sort of contribution as well.
I wonder how the government will deal (or make provision for) with small business that are "furloughing" their staff while asking them to work from home.
From the beginning, it was quite clear that this was bound to happen. Just like for the the stay at home order, I think the government is mishandling the response by being vague and noncommittal. This will simply make things worst in the long run.
It's not all bad. We've just wrapped up our first two completely remote hires. A full time project manager and a part time HR assistant. It's been an interesting experience for a small-but-growing (30ppl) company, especially because we had a very strong focus on physical presence before.
Remote interviews were an interesting challenge. Remote paperwork went somewhat smoother than expected. Introducing the new hires to the rest of the team is something we need to get better at.
Well... That's an overhyped media headline. In reality it is a stock based compensation over the next 5 years, based on performance of the stock price, capped at a maximum of 30 million. So it was already very unlikely he was going to get 30m (= 6 per year) pre-crisis. And given the current stock market he is probably going to get nothing for the coming two years or longer.
Lulz, classic case of bad incentive: I bet revenues for online gambling are way up at the moment, now that more and more people are forced to stay home and be fundamentally unsupervised all day. But because stock markets are drying up across the board, stellar profits might well not get reflected in stock prices.
Just another reason for not basing exec compensation on stock prices.
Good point - I was thinking card games really, and it's true that most sports betting is currently frozen - although there are reports that minor leagues (which are still running in some countries) are being heavily targeted by desperated punters and gambling orgs.
That is standard in Germany. For a period of upto 12 months during emergencies, employees contracts can be reduced to x% (for x % hours), the govt will cover the remaining money (upto 60% of net salary). Its called shotrt-term work or kurzarbeit.
That's happening in all modern countries right now and the correct way to combat this downturn instead of letting companies go bankrupt or do layoffs. Do your research and you will see that this is not controversial at all.
As a Frenchman I can recommend light protests, from home.
Instead of burning a few wooden pallets and having a BBQ while blocking the company entrance, you guys could perhaps put a firewall rule to drop all incoming traffic to the VPN and having an online video party.
Regardless of timing or events, the 30mil individual bonus was still taken while 10% of employee's salaries were cut. That's excessive and a slap in the face to those employees.
No-one could have predicted this pandemic and the drastic measures companies have to take. When they paid the bonus they had no idea they would have to cut salaries a few months later. The timing is essential since one event happened before the pandemic and one afterwards. We could argue about bonuses in general but that's a whole different topic.
I am not sure what is so particular about this company that the CEO deserved 30M, while neglecting to have a rainy-day fund, just like any reasonable business should. With 30M of bonus, it does not seem like the company was struggling last year?
I don't think any bonus at that level is deserved but just look at how many healthy companies that apparently didn't have a rainy-day fund and are already struggling.
Maybe? The discussion has derailed from a misrepresentation of facts to people holding on to their anger and finding unrelated ways to slander the company. They gave a bonus, then corona hit and they had to cut salaries, like so many other companies have.
If you ask me I think all bonuses should be returned but again, nothing uniquely evil about this company.
Hurting the company is the point of this kind of protests, but you shouldn't do it alone with your company credentials for sure.
Some employers may want to fire the people who organize the protests, but in France the employees representatives are more protected than others and you can't fire them easily. It has pros and cons.
How protected is this kind of direct action? If it's ok to disrupt the company's services is it also ok to disclose or destroy customer data? Where does the law draw the line?
I've heard about workers in France literally kidnapping and stripping the clothes from their bosses and it being tolerated. I think that kind of thing is never tolerable under any civil circumstance. If a co-worker tried to kidnap me I'd see that as a threat to my life and I'd be fighting for survival.
You cannot be fired if you protest in a reasonable way yes. Disclosing or destroying customer data is not acceptable no. I'm not a law expert so I cannot tell you were the line is. I guess nobody really knows precisely.
Kidnapping is for sure not acceptable. Stripping the clothes as well, it was very criticized everywhere in the world including France when the AirFrance HR cunt got his shirt destroyed. If you work in France in the future, don't be scared about being kidnapped by your co-workers. It's very unlikely, especially if you are not a bad CEO, and I don't remember physical harm happening. I'm not saying it's acceptable, but it's a very small risk and you should not dismiss the benefits of protesting for only a few protests that went wrong over the last 10 years.
> cut all employee salaries by 10% across the board
How does that work exactly? I imagine you're presented with a contract that says "you salary is now <previous salary 0.9>"* and you're also told (or heavily implied) that if you don't sign, you're fired.
Surely the employer can't just start paying you less than specified in your original contract? And maybe if you don't sign, you're owed some benefits (but who wants to be jobless going into pandemic+recession+inflation)?
If they follow the procedure in the UK, they can do this AFAIK. Though, they might need to make the position redundant and offer another position at a lower wage. Either way, it's a contract change.
Claiming someone is redundant and then hiring someone else to do essentially the same job, but on worse terms and probably with a different job title or other deceptions to try to disguise what you're really doing, is a trick as old as the sun. UK employment lawyers and tribunals are likely to laugh you out of the building with an expensive lesson if you try it.
What large companies do is hold a large minority stake in their group companies. Then they shut down the 'programme' in one company and move it, modulo some cosmetic changes, to another group company.
Citation very much needed. I have never seen anything in UK employment rights law that says "unless the employer is in trouble".
If the business is in danger of going bust because it can't afford to keep people on then it may need to make some of them redundant (and redundancy rights will then apply), but that's totally different to unilaterally changing the contractual terms of employment for the worse.
I believe s.98(1)(b) of the Employment Rights Act 1996 [1] allows dismissal for "some other substantial reason" which could be argued to cover this scenario and there is some case law such as Garside and Laycock Ltd v Booth [2]
It appears that the case in question has not yet been definitively resolved, though, and the argument made would contradict almost everything many employment lawyers have been advising for a long time about the implications of the ERA in this area. Notably, that includes a lot of advice given during the previous financial crisis just over a decade ago, when similar questions were widespread.
The conventional legal wisdom seems to have been that mandating a pay cut is not allowed, because it's not a permitted deduction from wages and it's likely a breach of contract, and that firing someone just for refusing is not allowed either, because any decisions about who to let go if the business is in financial trouble are a separate matter that should be made objectively. That would mean without reference to the refusal by any given employee to accept worse terms of employment, and without conflating a position that might now be redundant with any employee currently holding that position who might also be able to work elsewhere in the business instead.
I, as an expat, am absolutely grateful and have changed my tune on the “European welfare state” trope to “this just makes sense”. I got let go from a Berlin based fintech and got 3 months pay plus a small severance. They did this likely because funding fell apart during the pandemic but it could have also been to cull people that they didn’t need but they did do right by us.
Employees are in a much weaker position than companies, they are not in an equal position so consent doesn't come into the equation, as far as I'm concerned.
Yes, that’s the common argument for it (which of course does not address the violation of consent issue). I was simply replying to WhyNotHugo’s amazement and trying to clarify why many people feel the way that they do.
I’m not sure I follow that logic. Written, signed contracts where the agreeing parties are not being coerced is presently our gold standard for opt-in consent.
Employment contracts in the US (if they exist at all and aren’t simply an implicit agreement, so-called “at will” in most states) don’t generally provide for severance. Almost every one I’ve ever read allows for either party to opt out at any time without penalty, or explicitly states what the remaining liabilities would be in the instance that one of the parties did end the transaction.
If you don’t have a written, signed contract, you cannot assume future consent to perpetuating or extending a transaction. There wasn’t any explicit future-consent.
The existence of a written, signed contract changes that.
> Consent can be withdrawn at any time, with no further obligations or liability. That’s key in a free society.
I'm sorry but there's plenty of both liabilities and obligations in the event of early termination. Have a look at your telco contract if you don't believe me
.. but that doesn't exempt the parties from performing obligations! You can't, say, order a meal at a restaurant and then "withdraw your consent" from paying for it.
This is just a bad-faith attempt at using the language for sexual and interpersonal consent to pretend that businesses and workers are on an equal footing and have no obligations to their staff.
And Iceland, which is as free-wheeling a capitalistic state as anyone could want under the hood.
Making employers responsible for severance pay is a way of aligning costs with information asymmetry, and also trying to make employers at least a little sensitive to the impact their whims can have on real people's lives.
The less-developed countries have generally been that way since their independence from colonialism.
The argument that the regulatory burden on small businesses can be bad for economic growth does have some real validity - the great work on this is Hernando De Soto's The Other Path on Peru. However, that's an argument for making the tradeoff in an informed way and exempting small businesses (something the EU is extremely bad at!), while being against severance pay in its entirety is just a profit-before-humans talking point.
Well its a society that lacks some basic societal qualities many others find quite necessary to call the society well developed. Like taking care of those in need, weak, disabled etc. The thing is, the state is setup to prefer overall economic performance over 'being nice and generous', so tons of shortsighted people think along the lines of 'well I am doing fine, I don't want to support others in need, thus I can have more' and so on.
The logic is stupid of course, we all live in society so well-being of your fellow countrymen transform into your well-being too in many direct and indirect ways.
But if you are told from birth your country is the best, has the best system, all others are worse, cash is the king and your job is the most important aspect of your worthiness as a human being, well... it ends up in similar system.
Don't take me wrong, its fantastic to be super rich and powerful in US (just like anywhere else), its great to start/own company there, but it progressively sucks the more you are poorer, much faster than in any other western society.
I'm not very familiar with the topic. But my current and previous US companies both provide decent severance to let go employees. They do it mostly to ensure employees don't talk or try to sue. I assume most good companies in the US follow.
It's also important that people can get unemployment benefits for at least 6 months after losing their job. I'm not sure how that works in the US. I'm guessing it changes per state like everything else in the US.
Other things equal, if companies need to pay severance, employees get paid less each month, because companies need to take into account expected severance costs in their total labor costs and there's less money left for other benefits.
So all employees effectively pay for layoffs, which goes against you if you're not the one that gets laid off.
(I am very much in favor of mandatory severance and generally other kinds of safety nets.)
This forgets the high likelihood that the amount that would have been paid as severance goes to the pockets of the owners and leadership. The market pays what the employees are worth, not what is left over after costs.
> So all employees effectively pay for layoffs, which goes against you if you're not the one that gets laid off.
Or you could say that the company needs to save the profit generated by your position until it equals your anticipated severance before paying dividends from that profit. So it’s still a drag on profits, but it has nothing to do with other employees.
> So all employees effectively pay for layoffs, which goes against you if you're not the one that gets laid off.
Sounds like a very acceptable compromise. I'm happy to chip in. I'm also happy that I pay taxes for universal healthcare so that I can take advantage of that when I'm in a disadvantaged position, but that's me.
Having done budgeting for hiring employees in the UK, for small and medium sized companies, the factors that went into calculating staff costs never included any severance or redundancy factors. Paying redundancy is relatively rare, so doesn't need allocated funding until you're in that process.
When you're employing people you're not already thinking about their future exit. You hire based on your growth, so you're usually optimistic about the future and thinking about employees being long term. If not you hire contractors, who you can lay off easily.
Part of this is that you can't just fire people without good cause and without following a process. There are probationary periods to allow the hire to be let go if they don't work out in the first 6 months or so, but after that you're into a long "managing them out of the business" process that may or may not end up with a pay off.
> When you're employing people you're not already thinking about their future exit. You hire based on your growth, so you're usually optimistic about the future and thinking about employees being long term. If not you hire contractors, who you can lay off easily.
+1 for the contractors thing. If there is already an expiration date for these people, then make them a contractor or reach out to a staffing firm.
> but after that you're into a long "managing them out of the business" process that may or may not end up with a pay off.
I'm sure you already know, but in the UK you can be fired for any non-protected reason within the first 2 years of employment. I think UK companies are typically less cavalier than their US counterparts when it comes to firing, but in the frist 2 years, the employee protections are similar to US at-will states.
1 - If you make it too hard to let people go, companies will be less willing to hire. (You’ve added a cost to the employee)
2 - If you make the cost of severance too high, it will kill companies that might otherwise have a chance to squeak through.
There are plenty of good arguments on the other side (companies offloading social costs to the govt, etc) but these two are consistent with economic theory on labor supply and demand.
Yeah, but because it is o easy to fire, some companies (especially startups which just got some VC money) over-hire and then are forced to let people go.
This creates a never-ending hamster-wheel of hiring-firing - not good for the employee and not good for the company.
Also, if paying 1 month of severance is too much for a company, then perhaps it is not run well and should be allowed to fail?
Too reductive on your last comment. I want to agree with you, but the world is complex. Money doesn't grow on trees, and there's only so much that even a well run business can do. Particularly in the early stages of a company.
I must admit that as a small business owner in France unfortunately I am unwilling to hire because it's so hard to let people go, so putting the weight only on companies is maybe not the answer.
I agree. There has to be a balance. Companies need to be able to let people go who are hurting the company overall. The balance comes in in making it expensive enough that they won’t go firing people without cause as it now being expensive means it has to be worth it to do so.
I agree that no severance sucks. Although keep in mind that in theory, higher salaries should equal hire savings. The average developer in SF makes more than the average developer in Berlin (how much more... maybe 2X)? If you could make 100% more & forego a severance package, would you?
It's not a real world choice, I'm just trying to offer context that one way to look at higher salaries is that you are getting cash more cash upfront instead in lieu of having a stronger social safety net. And people who work crap jobs just don't have a safety net, which is another conversation.
Yeah I mean of course I’d like to make 250k and have huge stock options I’m just not that caliber of developer yet. But for devs that are and live in Germany (this has come up with my former German colleagues— whom I still consider friends) they are cognizant of the salaries of their American counterparts but the benefits of healthcare and the transit system and the access to all the good food and other European countries I think is a big win for them. I might be projecting but they could move their families to the states and take jobs with any of the big tech companies, my former teammates could, but they won’t. There’s such a thing as good enough income, and given that a lot is provided for here I understand that now, too.
Sure but if devs were paid half but then the other half went to healthcare or more lucrative unemployment insurance etc perhaps the cost of living in SF and the surrounding areas wouldn’t be so great... as a free market economist by training I can’t believe I’m saying this I just know that for the vast majority of us not in the 1% of their fields when we get let go having these safety nets is really nice.
as does not having to pay out of pocket for unavoidable medical expenses. why should I be tethered to an employer who pays me less money but gets a better discount on insurance due to their massive size? "somehow" the bigger a corporation gets, more government subsidies get thrown at them, which in turn get used to subsidize the cost of employees and further get used as leverage for insurance pricing?
> If you could make 100% more & forego a severance package, would you
for a company I've never worked for? I would have to be stupid to do so. You have no idea what the culture or ethic of the team looks like, and you're willing to not care for only 100%? I wish I had that kind of free time.
That's true because in Europe (at least in France) there is the concept of direct salary and indirect (or redistributed) salary.
In France if you earn 50k/month, your boss actually pays you ~100k. 50k is going in your pocket, and the other 50k goes to a centralized fund which pays for healthcare, pensions, and unemployment compensations ; things you would have paid for yourself otherwise.
People in France complains a LOT about those 50k that are "lost" but in fact there are "forced savings", or "indirect salary", what they don't realize is that not having a centralized compulsory saving system end would up costing them so, so much more.
American Capitalism sure as hell isn't. The rest of the world started down that path and now the rivers and oceans are choked with plastic, to the point there is a giant plastic island in the Pacific, and the world keeps getting warmer.
Europe has problems, but they've had their periods of extreme expansion and contraction and learned their hard lessons.
Really??? If you want to get into the environmental side of things there is endless ammo. We could start with Germany intervening to water down carbon emissions policy in order to protect its auto industry, and go from there...
I'm not going to disagree with you here. In politics, multiple positions need to be taken into account, and angry voters are to be avoided. The pressure on the car industry is still huge, though.
The new average emissions target for new cars in the EU is 95g CO2/km. That's equivalent to 4.1 l/km (57.4 mpg) of gas or 3.6 l/km (65.3 mpg) of diesel. That's already ambitious on paper, but manufacturers are soon required to have cars record the actual consumption of their fleets on the road.
It's more than that. In Germany, you actually have to prove that the firing was really necessary from a business point of view. Given the current government measures (Kurzarbeit etc.) and the fact that it's not clear the role wouldn't come back in a couple of months, it's contested whether covid19 and subsequent lack of funding is a valid reason for termination. But IANAL.
Of course, just because you could doesn't mean you actually should sue. For one thing, as a tech worker you're probably better off just finding a different job; if you're someone from a different profession who has a harder time finding jobs (or you're pregnant or sick or something), it's different of course.
I am just saying this because I was fired (together with my whole team) recently for very dubious reasons and while I did get severance, I am not sure it would have been actually legal (especially after it turned out the reasons they gave us were largely bullshit). But in the end it wouldn't have been worth it going into a legal argument.
Unfortunately I already signed the termination agreement. Honestly it’s probably better I just find a new role even though I think legally it’s a bit suspicious given the history of the company to experience mass layoffs.
Wow, it's also so cold to just read a script emotionlessly when communicating something so sensitive, rather than at least trying to be in the moment with these people.
The news here in Romania say that there are 1M fired. I don't believe that, smells like fake news. However I don't see how small firms will survive a two month pause. We will surely have lots of people fired but they won't make the news because they did not work at Google ;)
Are you able to mention who or what kind of companies? I could guess mobility / scooter sharing off the bat, but have not heard from many being let go.
Why would it be? Europe is getting hit a lot harder and its economy is quickly collapsing. European banks were also weaker and less stress resistant than their US's counterparts so their ability to lend isn't a strong. Same thing for the EU corporations themselves, who are usually more in debt and have less access to non-bank financing (ie public bonds markets). So I'd be really surprised if we saw more lay offs in the US at the end of this
One reason that it's could be less bad is due to government measures - e.g. in the Netherlands, employers can apply for the government to pay 90% of your salary for a while while they pay the other 10%, so that they can keep employing you until (hopefully) after things start up again.
No idea how that compares to other companies, but if it differs, that's one possible explanation for different results.
I'm not too familiar with CARES, but I think the difference is that that is a one-time loan, whereas I think the Dutch government is taking up 90% of the salary costs every month, for a period of at most three months (so adding up to 270%), and is a gift, not a loan.
That said, my overall point was that different measures can lead to different results - not that specific measures were different.
The CARES Act “loan” is structured as a loan in order to (a) enforce the use of funds for payroll expenses, and (b) use existing banking infrastructure. IIRC if you keep 80% of staff, the loan is forgiven.
That said, the PPP ran out of funds today, so not all businesses are getting saved.
Not sure if the percentage is the same but small businesses (less than 500 employees) in the US can apply for a loan that converts to a grant if you keep your current employment levels for a set time. 75% of the loan has to be for payroll and the other part for rent, mortgage, and utilities.
Unfortunately the PPP money has all been dried up as of today, and many small businesses weren't able to take advantage of it. This site was put together to track how many businesses have received it, though it relies on self-reporting from the businesses so it won't be entirely accurate: https://www.covidloantracker.com/
I'm not an expert on the measure, but the Wikipedia page on it [1] doesn't mention anything like that. It does say that the compensation depends on how much of an organisation's income has been lost, and that it (obviously) only applies as long as the employee is not fired.
Norway is seeing its share of layoffs. I think it's mostly related to corona affected businesses like bars, restaurants, travel, retail and also oil & gas since the oil price fell like a rock.
Norway went from 65 000 to 290 000 unemployed since beginning of March.
We also have something called "permittering" where you don't loose your job, but you stop working and get aid from the state. It's meant for temporary dips where there is less work for your company but you think it'll pick up within the next 6 months. Pay is usually ~66% of your regular salary.
For "permitteringer" we went from 1 000 - 2 000 per month on average to 345 000 in the last 1 1/2 months.
In Norway we have around 2.67 million people in work. So we have seen a reduction of our workforce by 10% since beginning of March.
I'm in neither of those places and we have a dramatic increase in unemployment (4% -> 26%), mostly furloughed employees. The local government is encouraging it probably because they don't need any special new legislation or methods to provide unemployment benefits.
Astek Group* (a french consulting firm) laid off around 5% of its sophia-antipolis office (~15 out of 300), which put them in conflict with the government that has put funds to help people maintain 84% of their salaries if they work part-time (furlough?).
I think they just allowed anonymous posts. Different era where they were actually sort of reliable. I think they got sued a lot which forced them to shut down. In the end Fucked Company was fucked, too.
It allowed employees to leak when their company was laying off employees. There was a sister site called luckedcompany.com which allowed employees to leak when their company got investment (IIRC)
In form, it was a pretty simple discussion site. But it had a lot of insider info and an enormous amount of snark, and it really captured the spirit of the popping of Bubble 1.0 (and the post 9/11 downturn).
I remember one where a CEO made a big deal about the tech staff working through the holidays to finish vital new products. And then the CEO went on vacation to Hawai'i, leaving the nerds to grind it out. The memo and vacaction leaked to Fucked Company, where comments were spirited, and I think it eventually caused a big to-do.
I remember a suggestion to place all startups in a death pool which they were only allowed to leave if they managed not to buy any Aeron chairs (those were all the rage at that time) after one year in business. I loved that idea.
The other side of this, is the company I worked for about that time, purchased the entire set of office furniture from a defunct company to setup our office when we moved. Turns out we didn't need it all, and sold a lot of it. At the end of the year, the majority of our profit was the furniture hussle.
At the end of the first dot-com boom, there was a place in San Jose called Consolidated Office Supply which bought the furniture of failed dot-coms. They had a warehouse which covered an entire city block, full of used furniture. Looked like the warehouse from Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I bought furniture there for something I was starting up. Very cheap, and they delivered.
I am currently sitting in an Aeron chair from one of the dot com bust furniture auctions...
I had a friend who rescued servers just abandoned in their racks when one company just folded mid-day, the last remaining guy just walked out of the office.
Crazy times.
We all got hooked on the forum when waiting for news of the inevitable for our company, which ironically didn't fail, and we actually ended up cashing out in an acquisition.
IIRC, some of Howard Stern's wack pack people were regular posters on the forum as well. It was a pretty awesome message board for that era, until ruined by nazis and other lowlifes.
>Dot Com Boom & Bust - Digital Entertainment Network
>A parody of the founders of Digital Entertainment Network. DEN was "a quintessential example of the excesses and lack of control of the dot-com craze."
For Goldhaber and Braun, we
recall the line of Guildenstern
in coming out the losers in a
game of princes and kings from
Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead: "There
must have been a moment, at the
beginning, where we could have
said - no."
He started and is running DistroKid, which is probably the most popular way for independent music artists to get their music into digital stores and streaming services.
There was a German equivalent called Dotcomtod (dotcomdeath), which had incredible amounts of inside knowledge. I had just started a small software company and for some reason loved reading their stories. One of the key people of Dotcomtod (Don Alphonso) is now a famous blogger with conservative/libertarian views.
Kind of, though the main draw for me was all the stories of hubris and ineptitude, and it was largely just the money of the rich being burned up in the process.
When Oracle data cloud had 20% layoffs in September (~250 people) that site was the best and worst place. You could see layoff reports in realtime and get info on how to do benefit claims/etc.
Very scary to sit in an office where nobody is working because we are waiting to see who gets let go next.
Hospitals are having a surprisingly tough time of things. I work for a very famous hospital in a small town in the American midwest, and we've (our IT department, that is) laid off all our contractors and the rest of us have mandatory furloughs coming up too. They're doing everything they can to not let us go, but some of us will probably end up getting sacked. And this is maybe the richest and most well-connected hospital in the entire world! Turns out that when you cancel all elective procedures (not only non-essential surgeries, but things like allergy testing and pediatric audiology work etc.), you can very quickly go from a billion dollars in the black (last year) to an estimated billion dollars in the red (this year). Just brutal.
Same thing is happening in Australian hospitals, dentists, etc etc. All elective procedures are banned to keep the hospitals empty so suddenly a lot of income is gone. Everything is closing down.
IT security in hospitals is already lacking in general. Cutting all this staff is going to expose them to even worse situations. Obviously they can't make money they don't have magically appear but these layoffs will end up making things even worse.
I mean your first problem there is having a capitalist healthcare system. It's absolutely insane the way the US funds its medical care. Hopefully you guys will see some improvements there in the next few years, and maybe even universal healthcare like an actual civilized society.
True, but that's a little above my pay grade. I'd just like to get my current project over to the SQA guys before we all go on extended unpaid holiday, lol.
Hey, sad to hear that healthIT is not getting a better safety net. I am in healthtech startup and some sales were let go but the business is still up so development goes on.
I was hoping that hospitals would get better funding after such a crisis and especially things like electronic or personal medical records for telehealth could get a strong support...but not the case as it seems.
Hey onychomys, I am doing some research about the state of Tech and how it’s integrated into the healthcare system, and the insurance providers. Would it be ok if I asked you a few questions?
It's not just for-profit hospitals, non-profits are very focused on elective surgery as well. Why? Because elective surgery is the money maker for the business. Healthcare systems typically have profit margins between 1-4% with 4% being on the high side. For comparison SAAS businesses typically have profit margins of 70-95% [1].
1 - https://www.lightercapital.com/blog/calculating-gross-margin...
The existence of for-profit healthcare is reasonably why hospitals have to shut departments in the middle of a pandemic to handle balance sheets. If for-profit healthcare didn't exist, I really don't see how the total amount of money going into a hospital would decrease right now.
You are conflating “for profit” with private. Most good hospitals are non profit, but private institutions.
To help you understand how this could decrease revenue - my annual checkup is postponed by 6 months. This is true for everyone who had an annual checkup scheduled.
This is a common misconception about health care. Most countries have a mix of private/public funding a mix of private/public run health care. Canada is almost all non-profit charity hospitals, but other OECD countries use for profit hospitals. For example:
>...The study, released Tuesday, compared the universal health-care systems of Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland, and looked at the presence of for-profit hospitals and for-profit health-care insurers in each of these countries.
...
The study found that for-profit health-care insurers and for-profit hospitals are found in all six countries. This is in contrast to Canada, where similar for-profit insurance is not allowed, and where only a small number of private, for-profit hospitals exist.
Sure, but in all of those countries health care insurers are incredibly tightly controlled and the state is still by far the biggest insurer. Which is why the state can and will fund hospitals directly after this crisis.
>Sure, but in all of those countries health care insurers are incredibly tightly controlled...
Insurance companies in the US are also "incredibly tightly controlled". Regulations even specify amounts that can be spent on patient care, administration etc. Health insurers are the only segment of the health care sector in the US where profits are directly limited.
>Which is why the state can and will fund hospitals directly after this crisis.
It does have a lot to do with it, as it directly nullifies the issue the OP was talking about.
When I mean incredibly tightly controlled, I mean effectively price controls, and very stringent ones at that, and all of them have the state as the main insurer anyways, while AFAIK the US does not insure anyone directly.
The government provides health insurance to many people. 44 million people are insured by Medicare. 74 million people are insured by Medicaid. Over 1 million veterans get their health care provided by the government run VA medical system.
As I pointed out, most countries have a mix of private/public funding a mix of private/public run health care. Lots of people seem to be under the misconception that universal health care coverage is only possible in a Canadian or UK type health care system.
Even non-profit, publicly funded hospitals are feeling the squeeze. Most are paid on a fee-for-service basis. If you cancel all your elective surgeries, there goes a huge chunk of funding. Yet you still need to pay salaries and other overhead.
It's not like non-profit hospitals are suddenly immune to the realities of economics.
Publicly funded healthcare does not work the way you think it does. There is a budget allocated to healthcare every year, if one year the hospitals don't have enough money to cover expenses but that there is still money left in the coffers (for example, due to less electives), then they will end up getting the money they need to operate.
Were it not for for-profit healthcare, the US would almost certainly operate this way.
There are probably 170 different versions of public systems. I think you're making the mistake of assuming they all operate the same way.
In both public systems I've been a part of, yes there is a hospital budget, but it's paid out through procedures. Don't have anyone in the hospital? No payment.
Sure, but what I'm telling you is that in the event of a major event that means that the amount of procedures goes down drastically which means the healthcare budget is not depleted, but that hospitals need to money to deal with a pandemic, the state steps in and will fund the hospitals.
Apparently many US hospitals are formally non-profits but operate very much in a corporate logic. What did mayo do with its bn profit last year that Op mentioned?
Mayo earns $12bn per year.
As contrast, a hospitals in Germany for a whole year cost €105bn, with an average total cost per stay (including operations etc ) of 4500€.
Non profits just make profits in a different way. Either the money goes to the leadership or into an endowment or new buildings or something else. Don’t confuse non profit with not greedy or not profitable. They are basically the same as for profit hospitals as far as cost goes.
We may disagree on political solutions, but I hope at this point everyone will acknowledge that in a society with otherwise so much wealth, health care shouldn't be that dysfunctional.
Will be very interesting to watch financial reports from health insurers. Premiums are the same, despite (almost) everyone consuming less health services.
Can Covid costs (at current patient levels) make up for the loss of other claims? I'm doubtful, especially since some Covid costs are evidently borne by the federal government. The suffering of hospitals is circumstantial evidence that insurers are paying out less overall.
> as millions of employees get laid off, millions of health insurance premiums stop getting paid.
Failure mode of a system where healthcare is tied to employment -- works as long as people keep shuffling around, shatters when a systemic black swan comes along.
And no, cobra doesn't address it. It's just a patch. Anyone actually pay cobra for more than a month or two? You quickly realize just how expensive employer group plans can be for an individual.
Well, whatever colour the swan is, a pandemic is no any unprecedented crisis. It's frankly more predictable than large scale earthquakes, but many people simply didn't give a shit to plan for it in advance.
A friend of mine works in a finance dept at Mayo and is getting furloughed. FTE not a contractor.
Quick edit: since he's been working there for the last 18ish months he has made it clear how poorly run and awful that place is to work for, sentiment is from way before covid.
My wife works at an orthopedic office as a PA and they're talking about how they'll probably have to work weekends just to catch up with the backlog of surgeries.
My stepfather is a doctor and reports the same. Unless you are actually swamped with COVID-19 cases, the lockdown is having the perverse effect that people are going to the hospital less often. Diseases in general are spreading less now, fewer accidents are happening, fewer elective procedures, along with a general fear of going to the hospital in general (presumably for fear of catching COVID-19 from someone there). He's seen fewer hours and staff cuts come from the situation.
My fiancee is a veterinarian, and it is the same there.
* Absolutely no overtime for hourly employees (the salaried doctors, of course, do 18-hour shifts)
* Doctors in elective departments (dermatology) are furloughed
* They've all but confirmed the techs will have layoffs
I work for a large healthcare org. We just had a hiring freeze and have to work hard to justify extending existing contracts with our contractors. At the same time, I am unsure how this will long term impact the org. Utilization of most services is down but we did have to buy a lot of ventilators/etc; also, I imagine health insurance membership will decline.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 81.7 ms ] threadIt's worth remembering there are plenty of companies not laying people off, and "normal" will return eventually.
That said, I was watching The Big Short yesterday, and a line that I had noted before haunted me even more: "For every 1% unemployment goes up [in the USA], 40,000 people die".
Stay safe, stay positive.
> Population health did not decline and indeed generally improved during the 4 years of the Great Depression, 1930–1933, with mortality decreasing for almost all ages, and life expectancy increasing by several years in males, females, whites, and nonwhites.
(Although, significantly, it does note that suicides increased, and another study found no increase in life expectancy, but no real change outside of suicides and car accidents.[2])
1: https://www.pnas.org/content/106/41/17290 2: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110324202055.h...
I think this is mainly fearmongering by the upper 0.1% seeing that now they might have to bear the "risk" they are always claiming to shoulder when taking in enormous returns on their capital... (e.g. in Germany currently most car-companies (BMW and VW are both largely family-owned) still pay their dividends, while their employees are getting unemployment benefits from the state...).
In the end history tells us, that people generally seem to prefer to stay alive however low the odds are. If this has significantly changed in the last 50 years, maybe we should think about what has changed that – I seriously doubt that a "let's go back to business" is the right approach in that case.
I have seen that line too, but I wonder how substantiated this is? Is there any data to support it?
1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3070776/#R41
2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3070776/#R65
Also probably much more transient, no?
Is there a reason to think this trend would continue beyond say... six months? (or whenever quarantine measures are mostly relaxed).
If we relax quarantine measures, the virus just comes back immediately. This is going to stay with us for years.
Where did you get that number? This seems more like propaganda than scientific claim.
> Results
> Overall, during the recent recession, an increase of one percentage point in the standardised unemployment rate has been associated with a statistically significant decrease in the following mortality rates: all-cause-mortality (3.4%), cardiovascular diseases (3.7%), cirrhosis- and chronic liver disease-related mortality (9.2%), motor vehicle accident-related mortality (11.5%), parasitic infection-related mortality (4.1%), but an increase in the suicide rate (34.1%). In general, the effects were more marked in countries with lower levels of social protection, compared to those with higher levels. Conclusions
> An increase in the unemployment rate during the Great Recession has had a beneficial health effect on average across EU countries, except for suicide mortality. Social protection expenditures appear to help countries “smooth” the health response to a recession, limiting health damage but also forgoing potential health gains that could otherwise result.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009174351...
Many animals live longer in captivity than in the wild.
Restricting your caloric intake as much as possible will prolong your lifespan.
There's more to health than just how long you live.
We do not live in a 1930s world of belligerent alliances itching for a chance to bloody someone up.
Wars between the big powers are now economic and political. Nobody wants nuclear annihilation.
> Did the Great Recession affect mortality rates in the metropolitan United States? Effects on mortality by age, gender and cause of death.
> Our finding that all-cause mortality decreased during the Great Recession is consistent with previous studies.
And yes some specific mortality like cancer did increase because of the broken -- profit based -- health care system. But otherwise, no.
Extreme sports may technically have a long term boost on life expextancy (from fitness) but short term would make a spike in accident deaths. I guess money is sort of the same way - better outcomes from affording healthcare but the temptation to take risks results in more immediate deaths.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2010/04/wall-street-excerpt-...
But if you mean dot-com-crash bad in terms of the economy in general crashing, oh man are you right. This is an economic free-fall for most of America.
"fail fast; fail often" seems ominously dark for the circumstance.
https://www.pnas.org/content/106/41/17290
And the list is just startups, too - they're obviously more vulnerable in many ways to financial shocks than large companies, but large corporate layoffs are going to be where the big numbers are.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/finance/markets/australia-unexpect...
To quote, "all jobs are essential services".
[1] https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/
- low density
- government actually listening to scientists and reacting quickly and non-ideologically.
The government responding quickly and non-ideologically is the number one reason why Australia is doing good and the rest of the west is doing so badly. Whether it's the ideology of freedom of travel or the ideology of the economy before health, it has hurt other nations whereas Australia's ideology of pragmatism (and our neverending experience with many other crises and disasters) has helped.
Leadership in the early days of the crisis made a huge difference. The early days of the crisis now are passed us, so whatever happens next it is about perseverance - a completely different matter and something a country does not excel at if it goes through prime minister faster than a pub goes through sixpacks.
I could make a list, but I won't. Instead I'll focus on the positives and note that the one commendable thing that the federal government has done in this crisis is to reach deep into their mothballed hip-pocket and squeeze out a few billion pineapples.
I fully appreciate how hard that must have been, given their fixation on 'the black'. And all with only half a whinge.
For real? Morrison’s response to this has been lacking in its effectiveness and treacle-like in its speed. Up until a few weeks ago he was saying that people shouldn’t stop going to football games, and up until teachers put their foot down and in spite of health professions advice and common sense he thought keeping schools open indefinitely and as a fine idea.
I'd be cautious with this point.
Sydney is more dense than LA, Chicago. It is lower than NYC. But still for an urban area of over 5 million people it's densely populated and has all the ingredients for a bad outbreak. https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/the-truth-about-...
What's it actually like there? It sounds like you're under strict lockdown but everyone seems to be saying the government is doing a terrible job (even though the test positive rate is low and the relative number of cases, even the absolute number of cases, is low). Here you say the economy is still humming along but other people say there's queues outside of Centrelink and down the street and around the corner.
Are shops like Bunnings and Big W still open? Bike shops? Hobby stores? Gift shops? These are considered non essential here in Germany some of which has caused me difficulty and some of which have not (somewhere may be non essential this week, but over a long enough period of time, everywhere is essential; we just moved a fortnight before the lockdown and fortunately I bought the things I needed for a new home just before they were shut down as non-essential).
Restaurants I gather are closed to in house meals same as here. But same as here they're open for takeaway.
Factories and such businesses were closed in Italy, but I don't think they were shut down here.
Cinemas I take it are closed. Prisons in Victoria at least do not accept inperson visitors which causes prisoners severe isolation but is obviously better then getting them all infected. I understand prisoners are still working - if they're isolated and healthy I guess there's no reason to stop them from working.
Most retail shops are closed. A lot of restaurants and cafes are closed. All events cancelled. So there's a lot of casuals / partimers who don't have any work anymore.
Bunnings, BigW, Kmart, all supermarkets are open with social distancing and limiting people in the store. Not sure a bout bike stores. Hobbyco in QVB is still open. A lot of stores closed their retail but are still doing online orders.
Basically Australia uses a combination of blacklist and a whitelist system. Some places where people gather like gyms and pubs are forced to close, and restaurants are forced to takeaway-only. You also have a whitelist on reasons to come outside of your home, which still include work.
My company was good - we spend a week preparing and now almost everyone is working from home, which is probably unusual considering we work in embedded systems. I have several boxes of hardware in my room with me now.
Open and doing roaring business from what I can tell. Took my mountain bike to get serviced and my mechanic said he’s far busier than he anticipated and it’d be over a week before he could even get to my bike.
Most of our retail is still open, for example Target, Kmart, most coffee shops are still open doing takeaway and I can still go to JB HiFi, BBC shop, book shop, EB Games etc. So it seems like not a lot has changed regarding my current lifestyle except working from home.
Gyms, Massage, Casinos, Pubs, Clubs etc. that you’d expect to spread the virus really quickly are all closed.
Expect those numbers to change. A lot.
The company I'm in hasn't fired anyone and is safe.
Some neighboring countries have similar programs.
Take 2019 for instance. If that scheme existed then, without any pandemic, it would be a great way to soften the exit and allow folks time to find new jobs.
But the world we're in now, not so much. It's pulling the band-aid off slower, and my take is, waiting for a hail-mary play when someone magically comes up with a solution for this problem.
My interpretation of all of this waves hand around at world leaders is that they genuinely believe science and technology work like magic, and will come up with something, soon.
- A lot if them are not profitable. - They don't know how long this will last. - Many planned on growing into profitability over n months and expected they could raise more money if needed. - Now, there is no growth for many and contractions. - Investment money is drying up - they might not have 2 years at their current burn rate to get to profitable status.
In the end, it can be about survival. Their pre coronavirus burn rates are not sustainable. Of course, for some, it is also a continent way to shed staff who appear to be underperforming, freeze raises, and ask more of their employees.
For many (even unicornish) startups the funding is released in tranches, usually tied to certain performance metrics. With drastically reduced revenue, new customer flow all dried up, and even marketing result graphs simulating nosedives, there aren't that many milestones you could hit.
If [enough] performance milestones are missed, company's next batch of on-paper funding pot may not be released.
____
also a $14M Series A the same month: https://twitter.com/voipsipguruPB/status/1094042447070613504
Last week during covid crisis, all while announcing a $100m Series E round of financing, they let some employees go and did not offer any severance.
Disorganized management, and with some teams, passive-aggressive management style.
Would not recommend joining...
I have a fairly rare surname, but have {surname} at gmail, so I get a lot of "spam" from companies that sign me up before verifying if the user inputting my email is the person owning the email.
In the most egregious/spammy cases I'm gonna find some higher-up emails and sign them up for their own services in hopes that the practice will stop.
TL;DR: email confirmation or get egged.
Circle however I've used with some fairly lengthy and complex build processes involving multiple parallel builds of Rails apps during upgrades and it's handled the workflow well.
I think they've improved the UI a bit recently, but it's still pretty complex though.
Coupled with Terraform for us.
edit: I'll also add that in terms of time, I feel like most of the time in build pipelines is actually spent in tweaking, adding, and modifying the build configs, as opposed to the servers themselves (and you might also value developer time differently from devops time). I have found Buildkite easier to work with than CircleCI in this regard, and thus saved much more time overall.
The motivation for this was exactly this problem. With Box CI your local build is your CI build because it runs jobs via agents on your own hardware so you can very easily debug / understand what is going on.
The thing I'm concerned about that doesn't seem addressed on your home page is security : by installing your agent on my machine, I'm basically giving you access to my machine non-stop, no ? What guarantees do I have that your agent can't be used as a backdoor ?
Firstly, and very importantly, the agent is open source (https://github.com/boxci/boxci) so you can see exactly what it does and even build it from source if you want. I should mention Box CI isn't launched yet, everything is still in beta including the agent.
The Box CI service doesn't have any way to send requests to or send commands to agents - the requests are one-way, agent to service only, with agents polling the service for build jobs to run, running them, and sending logs and results to the service.
Build scripts and configuration are all in your source code. This is a tradeoff, because it definitely means you have to trust your source (and everyone committing to it) if you're going to be running agents on your dev machine for instance.
There are obviously mitigations to this though, like running the agents on a dedicated Cloud VM with nothing on the filesystem and internet access locked down to package manager and cloud provider hosts. A future plan is to provide pre-configured VMs for various cloud providers so this can be set up in a few clicks for low cost ($20 a month or whatever a reasonable build machine VM would cost).
The real security point of the the agents though, the other side of these tradeoffs, is that your code and your production secrets never leave hardware you control - the CI service never has access to them. That's a massive security advantage Vs centralised CI services which do have full read access to your source and effectively full write access to your production infrastructure via keys you give them - compared to what I've described above this is a massively bigger and more dangerous potential security hole.
You can probably tell by the length of this comment I'm super interested in this aspect (along with dev experience I see it as the key advantage of the model and one of the reasons I'm building it) there's a lot more depth to this and if you'd like to discuss further, I'd love to :-) Email's in my profile.
It's quite spartan, but it gets the job done, and I love that a) it's fast, b) I can see exactly what happened, down to ssh'ing into the build directory and poking around, and c) If there's a feature I want, I can just add it!
Here's my bot in action: https://github.com/lukechampine/us/pull/37#issuecomment-5936...
When something fails it makes the debug and retry loop just as simple and fast as when you're developing, and there's really nothing like watching a production build run and ship in literally like a minute, just as fast as if you're building and starting your local dev server :-)
I know for the fact that few US, Indian firms with offices in India are just using this as an excuse to trim their workforce, enforce paycuts (upto 50%), hold back increments for the year (and even next) and restructure salaries drastically - by moving almost 60% to vaiable pay(which typically never gets paid).
Such a list is live at https://careervscovid19.com/insights
Traditional BigCo ITeS/outsourcing shops are using this as a great opportunity to trim the flab in the middle (claiming as "a dire measure to sustain shareholder value") while it was always about . These are the same bunch in middle-management whom they would pamper regularly by giving quarterly/monthly awards (quarterly Gem, Spot awards, Player of the month, etc bullshit accolades)
And the markets also work that way. On a regular day, if there's firing, stocks of a BigCo go wonky sensing something is amiss. During a crisis, if they do not fire people by the thousands, markets deem it as lack of financial prudence and stocks go down.
Everything (and anything) in the name of profits and shareholder value. There's a saying dated thousands of years, goes like "vyaparam droha chintanam” meaning "Business is all about profits most often via undue advantages".
Related article - http://www.informaticsjournals.com/index.php/dbijb/article/d...
Most of the big firms (Tata, CTS, CapGemini) have big offices or call centers, with VPNs or private connections to western infrastructure -- otherwise you would have random Indian IPs logging into your systems, and that would make my security team lose their minds.
But with COVID they can't congregate in those offices, and the logistics of getting additional VPNs, working around geo-fencing, and the fact that some of the admins don't have internet at home means they're not able to support anything.
The handful of Filipino and Mexican offshore talent has been more successful in that regard. Mexican talent in particular has been pretty good -- more expensive than Indian hires, but generally more qualified with overlap of US timezones.
Yes, this is the reality. Most of these shops do not believe in issuing a laptop along with a secure connectivity option, simply because they deem all of that as a sap on procurements.
And they still use shitty 2005 era desktop since work gets done on VDIs (citing info sec and DLP) and desktops are mere dumb terminals. But even to operate those dumb terminals, they are ready to spend cost on electricity and logistics but will actively avoid issuing good equipment just to avoid cost on licenses and manageability.
Bunch of old coots that do not ever learn.
Living in Singapore, I met some people who trained India and then used their own good equipment and their productivity was on par with US or EU employees. I was also unfortunate enough to manage some people using '95 equipment, and they were basically dead weights for the project.
I used to work on a product with a web console. One of the things we designed and planned for was a login storm around 9-10 AM on Monday in pick-a-timezone where 200 users log in from the same IP. If you ignore the seasonality, it looks a bit like an attack.
They're replacing their ClojureScript mishmash of libraries with a React action team because they couldn't onboard effectively
As a customer, I can see I'm being pushed into this new UI that I'm indifferent to but moving between the options is difficult
As a Clojurian & customer, I'm not sure any of this bodes well
I'm in the final stages interviews and up until now have generally been looking forward to the prospect of working there. This is troubling. Thanks in advance.
If we can't, my advice to you is to backchannel. See if you have a friend of a friend's who works there, reach out to people via LinkedIn whom you didn't interview with, or find former employees, they will tell you the real story...
I bet they all had severance guaranteed in their contracts...
We basically just hit hard edges and missing features very quickly, and what’s there is good, but not great.
Each bit of the product feels good, but it feels like there’s a lack of direction, product thinking, understanding users, or something at a fundamental level that is causing friction.
I have a friend who worked there a few years ago and from her experience it sounds like there are some good engineers, but some careless decisions being made.
Productivity will recover when businesses can use resources productively. It's either keep the scheme running until quarantine measures are reduced enough to allow businesses to start ramping back up and productivity increases again, or remove the scheme and push people to unemployment which is worse for productivity. If the government is daft enough to stop the scheme before the quarantine measures are reduced we're in for a shit-show of a decade.
(If morbidly curious, you can keep an eye on tribunal outcomes at https://www.gov.uk/employment-tribunal-decisions .. I just checked this month's unfair dismissal outcomes and not a single one was in the complainant's favour, though some may have been withdrawn due to negotiating an offer.)
Never really felt such thing being anything but odd ball case in Europe.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/26/success/layoffs-women-minorit...
https://hbr.org/2019/01/why-most-performance-evaluations-are...
Links to the research cited are in the articles, which provide a basic overview.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I am a gay black man.
No, it's not. Even if they were favored, one racial minority group being favored and others being disfavored doesn't balance out to “no racism”, it's even more racism than the latter being disfavored alone. And even if there is no evidence of racism in either direction affecting Asians, that doesn't negate racism affecting other groups.
At best it might be accurate of you only look at Asians.
What's the line here? At what point would tech not be racist? I really don't see your point here. There is a lot of evidence pointing to a really diverse, generally progressive industry with, if anything, a higher over representation (compared to the population) of multiple minority groups, different gender identities and a much more inclusivity conscious mindset than probably any other industry. We have no data that really points to the opposite conclusion. Again, at what point would you not say that those are all exceptions?
When it's demographically representative.
See how absurd your expectations are?
Please be a little more receptive to stuff like this. Racism and sexism are social ills that affect the majority of people. It's worth your time to having a passing understanding of the major concepts.
What about them? (Mostly, what both of those show is what the structure of the immigration system favors for nationalities where there aren't lots of people who are eligible for family-based immigration.)
> Transgenders?
Mostly reflects that people of higher socioeconomic status and in social environments concentrated on particular geographic locations are more likely to primed to accept.(or, viewed another way, less strongly conditioned to deny) transgender identity, and that both of those correlate with onramps to the tech field. Not that that is germane in any way to racism since gender identity isn't a race/ethnicity.
> Neurodivergents?
Also aren't a race/ethnicity and so aren't germane.
> Iranians?
See above notes about Indians and Arabs.
> Muslims?
Aren't a race, but also see above notes about Arabs and Iranians (which apply to lots of other places where Muslim immigrants come from.)
> At what point would tech not be racist?
I never said tech was racist, I said that “some races are overrepresented” isn't counterevidence to racism but, absent evidence for some other explanation for the overrepresentation, supporting evidence.
But, that aside, obviously, at the point where no one was systematically disadvantaged in the field on the basis of their race.
> There is a lot of evidence pointing to a really diverse, generally progressive industry
No, there's not. There's a lot of evidence of an industry drawing principally from a narrow domestic racial and class pool, that on non-racial/class grounds overrepresents groups overrepresented in that pool, and which in addition to that domestic pool overepresents immigrants to the US on non-family bases because being in the industry is itself highly advantageous to employment-based entry into the US.
>There is a lot of evidence pointing to a really diverse, generally progressive industry with, if anything, a higher over representation (compared to the population) of multiple minority groups, different gender identities and a much more inclusivity conscious mindset than probably any other industry.
That is not true. Retail, labor, non-tech administration are good examples to the contrary. The difference in pay and prestige is telling.
Work permit/visa holders will see an increase in workload (with a "work-more-or-eff-off" note, along with possibly a paycut too) Even pay negotiations on open offers, making it seem generous tha offer doesn't get cancelled.
Personally know a couple of friends who are in the US (with H1Bs awaitng transfer/extensions) facing this particular situation now.
Hiring is fucked. Tech hiring and ex\mployment more so.
Seems every employer treats employees as though the wage slaves are just so, or just above hamsters on wheels doing tricks.
Depressing, to say the least! :(
Work permit workers (H1, OPT and L1-B in increasing order) are the worst exploited and least privileged sub group of the entire tech workforce.
Be it an upcoming economy with a flood of opportunities like we saw for the past 7 years or a downturn, like the one we are witnessing now, visa workers will be exploited no matter what.
They are not cheaper than non visa-dependent hires, but they are abundant, easy to hire, easy to fire, easy to replace, incredibly easy to bully, pressurize and basically exploit. The only barrier to total exploitation is the manager's own conscience and values. And we all know, values are easily compromised when it can help the bottom line.
Working on a visa in USA is fucked.
Some places call them Solution Architects too which IMO is a better name as they work with customers to help them see how their company solutions can be integrated and made useful.
I think you can usually tell what someone is not by looking at their job title. The last word tells you what they're not (except for those management positions where they do it backwards and say "vice president communications" - in those cases any parsable subcomponent of the name tells you what they are not; a vp comms can neither communicate nor are they a vp).
I mean, firing via e.g. Twitter is a thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeekblLkx4g
https://www.protocol.com/eventbrite-major-layoffs-coronaviru...
https://www.booksandpublishing.com.au/articles/2020/04/09/14...
Their tracker, https://layoffs.fyi/tracker/, has reasonably well corroborated data, although it's surely incomplete.
For example, my home state's Employment Security Department: https://esd.wa.gov/unemployment/laid-off-or-fired
Given that there are non-US readers here, maybe there's another pair of phrases that Hacker News could use as standard in this situation. I know in the UK, "made redundant" is used instead of "laid-off".
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
We've been penalizing these threads but I'm kind of changing my mind about that (other than that we don't want them very often because repetition is not good for the front page). Unfortunately they tend to devolve into junk, so there's more of a moderation burden.
Edit: this thread ended up making a poor case for having threads like this on HN. Most of it was off topic, and a lot of it went into low-quality rage and even outright flamewar.
Yes, though most Brits would pragmatically accept the term "laid-off" as covering redundancy, though formally a "lay-off" is the same as furloughing in the UK (i.e. not permanent).
> There is a difference between being laid off and fired.
> Generally, we treat your job loss as a layoff if your employer is not replacing you, and you'll qualify for unemployment benefits if you meet all of the eligibility criteria.
> If your employer is replacing you, we generally will treat you as being fired.
Some companies here are firing people so that they can replace them with people willing to work at a lower salary.
The article also allows the concept of no-fault firing:
> If you were fired through no fault of your own, such as not having the skills to do the job, you may be eligible for unemployment benefits.
So I think from a dictionary definition, it's an OK title; from an emotional perspective, I can understand how someone telling you that you were fired can be jarring.
However, we should remember that the shame is placed squarely on the shoulders of the company - in any case of firing, the company can always be seen as partially at fault, as it is usually caused by lack of forward thinking, agility, engagement or empathy.
So remember: Whether they laid you off or fired you, it is our job as a community to stand with you.
Video calls with friends and co-workers doesn't cut it, plus the 1 hour mandatory exercise.
I'd rather change jobs and be outside chopping wood or something that is "productive".
Your original phrasing is incorrect hence the confusion by the other persons' comment. It would be more accurate to call it a restriction.
"one form of exercise a day, for example a run, walk, or cycle - alone or with members of your household"
Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-outbr...
Here's the relevant law: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2020/350/contents/made
Here's the relevant section of that law: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2020/350/regulation/6/mad...
Here's the relevant text of that section:
> to take exercise either alone or with other members of their household;
There is nothing in that law that restricts either the number of times you can do that or the amount of time you can spend doing that. There _has_ been guidance issued by various people in government and law enforcement agencies, but that is exactly what it is: guidance. According to the law, you are free to take exercise either alone or with other members of their household, and the law doesn't care how often you do that or for how long.
(Caveat: that's the "England" version of the law; Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own versions; see e.g. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/id?title=Health+Protection+%28... )
I guess ultimately it's up to the individual - the longer you exercise for and the greater the area you cover, I guess the higher the risk of you spreading the virus if you have it or getting it is. But I think the government are crediting people with some common sense here, e.g. if you are in the middle of nowhere and don't see another person, you can probably justify exercising for longer to yourself more easily than in a crowded city.
FWIW, I've been doing about 30 mins cycling outside most week days in London, around an hour (sometimes 90 minutes) at the weekend. Would love to go further or more times a day, but feels like we have to do our bit to help, while also staying sane, personally I feel comfortable with this level.
[1] random link from Google, https://www.runnersworld.com/uk/news/a31973975/coronavirus-u...
Now: WFH with little to zero communication.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22854494
a startup based in London just fired 10% of their workforce. all were given two options: government's furlough scheme where the state pays 80% of the salary, or outright dismissal. interestingly, half chose to quit.
That said, I'm surprised half of people turned down 2k/month to job hunt.
Ah, I see you've never applied for Universal Credit. Immediate, it ain't.
Generally uk dev pay is very bad compared to US or even other Europe.
Contract work used to be basically the only way to make good money but this has now been nobbled. Not a good city to work in.
As a result permie developers generally don't have a huge amount of a savings.
Moved to New York following Brexit, now making literally twice that. (Paying twice that for housing, too, but my housing is more like 15 minutes from work instead of 60 and I have a real subway option instead of putting up with Southern Rail and the strikes.)
This isn't true. You'll get new style JSA for 6 months [1] pending you have contributed NI for the past 2/3 years which almost all will have.
https://www.gov.uk/jobseekers-allowance/eligibility
You're talking about universal credit which yes you won't qualify for with greater than 16k savings (pension savings or HTB ISA are however are excluded).
If you make them redundant instead then you must give them a redundancy payment as well. However, this only protects employees after two years and in any case it's capped at a low level relative to typical salaries in fields like tech, so this might not have been worth much to the staff at a startup. Many employers do offer more than this voluntarily, but I wouldn't necessarily assume any startup did.
Maybe the staff who chose to leave were more concerned about the future viability of the business, an extended pause in their career development, or both. Or maybe they really were offered voluntary redundancy on favourable terms.
Curiously, just yesterday the UK government announced some new measures aimed directly at supporting startups, particularly tech startups in their early stages that aren't yet making money. Apparently at least someone in government recognises the business model and feels it will be better to protect that part of our economy during the downturn, which is a remarkably enlightened view given how badly successive governments in the UK have treated small businesses in the past.
Although obviously you should consult with a proper employment lawyer.
Obviously this means employers who are abusing the system to try to force a pay cut on people or fire them by the back door when they weren't genuinely redundant may be out of luck. I'm not sure anyone is going to have much sympathy for employers doing that, though.
Do you have a link about this please? Hadn't heard of it until now
It sounds like some sort of investment-matching scheme, where the existing investors have to put more money in to keep the business viable but the government will then make some sort of contribution as well.
From the beginning, it was quite clear that this was bound to happen. Just like for the the stay at home order, I think the government is mishandling the response by being vague and noncommittal. This will simply make things worst in the long run.
Remote interviews were an interesting challenge. Remote paperwork went somewhat smoother than expected. Introducing the new hires to the rest of the team is something we need to get better at.
The CEO just awarded himself a 30mil bonus: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/playtech-plan-to-pay-boss...
Lulz, classic case of bad incentive: I bet revenues for online gambling are way up at the moment, now that more and more people are forced to stay home and be fundamentally unsupervised all day. But because stock markets are drying up across the board, stellar profits might well not get reflected in stock prices.
Just another reason for not basing exec compensation on stock prices.
Instead of burning a few wooden pallets and having a BBQ while blocking the company entrance, you guys could perhaps put a firewall rule to drop all incoming traffic to the VPN and having an online video party.
How could you ever trust an employee who did this with their access privileges?
A rainy day will arrive sooner or later - whether it is a pandemic or an economic crisis or a dry spell in additional funding, etc.
If you ask me I think all bonuses should be returned but again, nothing uniquely evil about this company.
Some employers may want to fire the people who organize the protests, but in France the employees representatives are more protected than others and you can't fire them easily. It has pros and cons.
I've heard about workers in France literally kidnapping and stripping the clothes from their bosses and it being tolerated. I think that kind of thing is never tolerable under any civil circumstance. If a co-worker tried to kidnap me I'd see that as a threat to my life and I'd be fighting for survival.
Kidnapping is for sure not acceptable. Stripping the clothes as well, it was very criticized everywhere in the world including France when the AirFrance HR cunt got his shirt destroyed. If you work in France in the future, don't be scared about being kidnapped by your co-workers. It's very unlikely, especially if you are not a bad CEO, and I don't remember physical harm happening. I'm not saying it's acceptable, but it's a very small risk and you should not dismiss the benefits of protesting for only a few protests that went wrong over the last 10 years.
Well the persons responsibles for stripping the Air France HR guy got 3 to 4 months jail sentences, so I don't know if I would call that "tolerated".
At the same time, in the US there's litterally an idiom for starting to kill your coworkers if I'm correct : "going postal".
So, overall, I prefer the most violent thing to happen at work to be shirt stripping.
How does that work exactly? I imagine you're presented with a contract that says "you salary is now <previous salary 0.9>"* and you're also told (or heavily implied) that if you don't sign, you're fired.
Surely the employer can't just start paying you less than specified in your original contract? And maybe if you don't sign, you're owed some benefits (but who wants to be jobless going into pandemic+recession+inflation)?
It still happens though.
What large companies do is hold a large minority stake in their group companies. Then they shut down the 'programme' in one company and move it, modulo some cosmetic changes, to another group company.
Bitter experience.
If the business is in danger of going bust because it can't afford to keep people on then it may need to make some of them redundant (and redundancy rights will then apply), but that's totally different to unilaterally changing the contractual terms of employment for the worse.
[1] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1996/18/section/98 [2] https://www.bto.co.uk/blog/refusing-to-accept-a-wage-cut-%E2...
It appears that the case in question has not yet been definitively resolved, though, and the argument made would contradict almost everything many employment lawyers have been advising for a long time about the implications of the ERA in this area. Notably, that includes a lot of advice given during the previous financial crisis just over a decade ago, when similar questions were widespread.
The conventional legal wisdom seems to have been that mandating a pay cut is not allowed, because it's not a permitted deduction from wages and it's likely a breach of contract, and that firing someone just for refusing is not allowed either, because any decisions about who to let go if the business is in financial trouble are a separate matter that should be made objectively. That would mean without reference to the refusal by any given employee to accept worse terms of employment, and without conflating a position that might now be redundant with any employee currently holding that position who might also be able to work elsewhere in the business instead.
I, as an expat, am absolutely grateful and have changed my tune on the “European welfare state” trope to “this just makes sense”. I got let go from a Berlin based fintech and got 3 months pay plus a small severance. They did this likely because funding fell apart during the pandemic but it could have also been to cull people that they didn’t need but they did do right by us.
I'm absolutely amazed at how people in the US are so against severance being mandatory.
It's just vastly better organized in a way that (largely) protects consumers from capitalism where it doesn't belong.
“I like free money” is hardly a good argument to support statements like “it just makes sense”.
That's not an argument also, Germany is actually doing very well for everyone ( civilians, business, healthcare, innovation, ...)
They are almost launching their contact-tracing app, while the poor, that need it, in the US get 1200$ in the next 3-6 months, lol.
The rich get 1.700.000 $ though, that's "normal". Good job! /s
Perhaps you were talking about the federal state saying that states have to look for their own medical supplies? That's nice
Employment is a transaction, like any other. Doing some business yesterday is no guarantee of business tomorrow.
You'll forgive us for not being convinced by your argument.
Except that you can't later withdraw your consent. You said that was "a violation of consent".
Which is it?
Employment contracts in the US (if they exist at all and aren’t simply an implicit agreement, so-called “at will” in most states) don’t generally provide for severance. Almost every one I’ve ever read allows for either party to opt out at any time without penalty, or explicitly states what the remaining liabilities would be in the instance that one of the parties did end the transaction.
If you don’t have a written, signed contract, you cannot assume future consent to perpetuating or extending a transaction. There wasn’t any explicit future-consent.
The existence of a written, signed contract changes that.
I'm sorry but there's plenty of both liabilities and obligations in the event of early termination. Have a look at your telco contract if you don't believe me
This is just a bad-faith attempt at using the language for sexual and interpersonal consent to pretend that businesses and workers are on an equal footing and have no obligations to their staff.
Making employers responsible for severance pay is a way of aligning costs with information asymmetry, and also trying to make employers at least a little sensitive to the impact their whims can have on real people's lives.
It’s interesting though, how would you go about establishing a proof?
I always enjoy Hans Rosling going through the stats, if you’ve time it’s well worth it https://youtu.be/FACK2knC08E
Hint: they do.
The argument that the regulatory burden on small businesses can be bad for economic growth does have some real validity - the great work on this is Hernando De Soto's The Other Path on Peru. However, that's an argument for making the tradeoff in an informed way and exempting small businesses (something the EU is extremely bad at!), while being against severance pay in its entirety is just a profit-before-humans talking point.
The logic is stupid of course, we all live in society so well-being of your fellow countrymen transform into your well-being too in many direct and indirect ways.
But if you are told from birth your country is the best, has the best system, all others are worse, cash is the king and your job is the most important aspect of your worthiness as a human being, well... it ends up in similar system.
Don't take me wrong, its fantastic to be super rich and powerful in US (just like anywhere else), its great to start/own company there, but it progressively sucks the more you are poorer, much faster than in any other western society.
It's also important that people can get unemployment benefits for at least 6 months after losing their job. I'm not sure how that works in the US. I'm guessing it changes per state like everything else in the US.
So all employees effectively pay for layoffs, which goes against you if you're not the one that gets laid off.
(I am very much in favor of mandatory severance and generally other kinds of safety nets.)
Or you could say that the company needs to save the profit generated by your position until it equals your anticipated severance before paying dividends from that profit. So it’s still a drag on profits, but it has nothing to do with other employees.
Sounds like a very acceptable compromise. I'm happy to chip in. I'm also happy that I pay taxes for universal healthcare so that I can take advantage of that when I'm in a disadvantaged position, but that's me.
When you're employing people you're not already thinking about their future exit. You hire based on your growth, so you're usually optimistic about the future and thinking about employees being long term. If not you hire contractors, who you can lay off easily.
Part of this is that you can't just fire people without good cause and without following a process. There are probationary periods to allow the hire to be let go if they don't work out in the first 6 months or so, but after that you're into a long "managing them out of the business" process that may or may not end up with a pay off.
+1 for the contractors thing. If there is already an expiration date for these people, then make them a contractor or reach out to a staffing firm.
I'm sure you already know, but in the UK you can be fired for any non-protected reason within the first 2 years of employment. I think UK companies are typically less cavalier than their US counterparts when it comes to firing, but in the frist 2 years, the employee protections are similar to US at-will states.
1 - If you make it too hard to let people go, companies will be less willing to hire. (You’ve added a cost to the employee)
2 - If you make the cost of severance too high, it will kill companies that might otherwise have a chance to squeak through.
There are plenty of good arguments on the other side (companies offloading social costs to the govt, etc) but these two are consistent with economic theory on labor supply and demand.
So have you run a business where you had to hire employees?
This creates a never-ending hamster-wheel of hiring-firing - not good for the employee and not good for the company.
Also, if paying 1 month of severance is too much for a company, then perhaps it is not run well and should be allowed to fail?
I agree that no severance sucks. Although keep in mind that in theory, higher salaries should equal hire savings. The average developer in SF makes more than the average developer in Berlin (how much more... maybe 2X)? If you could make 100% more & forego a severance package, would you?
It's not a real world choice, I'm just trying to offer context that one way to look at higher salaries is that you are getting cash more cash upfront instead in lieu of having a stronger social safety net. And people who work crap jobs just don't have a safety net, which is another conversation.
as does not having to pay out of pocket for unavoidable medical expenses. why should I be tethered to an employer who pays me less money but gets a better discount on insurance due to their massive size? "somehow" the bigger a corporation gets, more government subsidies get thrown at them, which in turn get used to subsidize the cost of employees and further get used as leverage for insurance pricing?
> If you could make 100% more & forego a severance package, would you
for a company I've never worked for? I would have to be stupid to do so. You have no idea what the culture or ethic of the team looks like, and you're willing to not care for only 100%? I wish I had that kind of free time.
In France if you earn 50k/month, your boss actually pays you ~100k. 50k is going in your pocket, and the other 50k goes to a centralized fund which pays for healthcare, pensions, and unemployment compensations ; things you would have paid for yourself otherwise.
People in France complains a LOT about those 50k that are "lost" but in fact there are "forced savings", or "indirect salary", what they don't realize is that not having a centralized compulsory saving system end would up costing them so, so much more.
${PEOPLE} = "americans"
it seems to compile as well...
Europe has problems, but they've had their periods of extreme expansion and contraction and learned their hard lessons.
The new average emissions target for new cars in the EU is 95g CO2/km. That's equivalent to 4.1 l/km (57.4 mpg) of gas or 3.6 l/km (65.3 mpg) of diesel. That's already ambitious on paper, but manufacturers are soon required to have cars record the actual consumption of their fleets on the road.
Of course, just because you could doesn't mean you actually should sue. For one thing, as a tech worker you're probably better off just finding a different job; if you're someone from a different profession who has a harder time finding jobs (or you're pregnant or sick or something), it's different of course.
I am just saying this because I was fired (together with my whole team) recently for very dubious reasons and while I did get severance, I am not sure it would have been actually legal (especially after it turned out the reasons they gave us were largely bullshit). But in the end it wouldn't have been worth it going into a legal argument.
Unfortunately I already signed the termination agreement. Honestly it’s probably better I just find a new role even though I think legally it’s a bit suspicious given the history of the company to experience mass layoffs.
No idea how that compares to other companies, but if it differs, that's one possible explanation for different results.
https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/cares-act-paychec...
That said, my overall point was that different measures can lead to different results - not that specific measures were different.
That said, the PPP ran out of funds today, so not all businesses are getting saved.
https://www.uschamber.com/series/above-the-fold/how-access-s...
[1] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tijdelijke_noodmaatregel_overb...
Norway went from 65 000 to 290 000 unemployed since beginning of March.
We also have something called "permittering" where you don't loose your job, but you stop working and get aid from the state. It's meant for temporary dips where there is less work for your company but you think it'll pick up within the next 6 months. Pay is usually ~66% of your regular salary.
For "permitteringer" we went from 1 000 - 2 000 per month on average to 345 000 in the last 1 1/2 months.
In Norway we have around 2.67 million people in work. So we have seen a reduction of our workforce by 10% since beginning of March.
Sources: - https://e24.no/spesial/2020/coronaviruset/permitteringer - https://www.ssb.no/arbeid-og-lonn/statistikker/arblonn
Also firing people is now temporaly banned (technically not, but it's much much more difficult to do until we're out of the state of alarm).
Eventually...
Italy is basically under state salary, the only one not using it, are companies with a meaning in this crisis (food producer etc...)
If you want to read more about the recent layoffs here is a link in French [0] (unfortunately behind an ad paywall)
[0] https://www.nicematin.com/economie/ce-groupe-base-sur-la-cot...
Right after September 11th, that site got very popular among engineers like me -- seeing (on a daily basis) which company bloodbath was next.
It was kind of fun, until it was our company.
Got their start in the heyday of the .com crash as domino after domino fell and many companies were exposed for the unviable company’s they were.
The site took great joy in documenting (mocking) companies that were once tall and proud and quickly collapsed.
I remember one where a CEO made a big deal about the tech staff working through the holidays to finish vital new products. And then the CEO went on vacation to Hawai'i, leaving the nerds to grind it out. The memo and vacaction leaked to Fucked Company, where comments were spirited, and I think it eventually caused a big to-do.
I bought furniture there for something I was starting up. Very cheap, and they delivered.
IIRC, some of Howard Stern's wack pack people were regular posters on the forum as well. It was a pretty awesome message board for that era, until ruined by nazis and other lowlifes.
(It's from "Fucked Company", so obviously it's NOT SAFE FOR WORK, but who's at work any more these days?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmaRTZpJgPA
>Dot Com Boom & Bust - Digital Entertainment Network
>A parody of the founders of Digital Entertainment Network. DEN was "a quintessential example of the excesses and lack of control of the dot-com craze."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Entertainment_Network
>I rescued this from Web Archive, and it was originally posted on the Fuckedcompany.com website, which went defunct in 2007.
Yes, THAT guy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6iDZspbRMg&t=19m42s
>Cryptocurrencies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company
Oh no :(, the Internet Archive fucked them:
https://web.archive.org/web/2/http://www.fuckedcompany.com/
>Sorry.
>This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.
Alternative archive of the front page, at least:
https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20060603194832/http://www...
Then they went from sorta fucked:
https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20091016001955/http://www...
To fucked:
https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20130104195206/http://www...
Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM?
A: IBM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleida_Labs
https://web.archive.org/web/19970617084520/http://www.suck.c...
Very scary to sit in an office where nobody is working because we are waiting to see who gets let go next.
I worked for one of these facilities years ago, and elective surgery was the only thing the administrators cared about.
Your parent comment refers to the Mayo Clinic, which is neither "for-profit" nor "a stain on the American healthcare system".
To help you understand how this could decrease revenue - my annual checkup is postponed by 6 months. This is true for everyone who had an annual checkup scheduled.
>...The study, released Tuesday, compared the universal health-care systems of Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland, and looked at the presence of for-profit hospitals and for-profit health-care insurers in each of these countries. ... The study found that for-profit health-care insurers and for-profit hospitals are found in all six countries. This is in contrast to Canada, where similar for-profit insurance is not allowed, and where only a small number of private, for-profit hospitals exist.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/for-profit-care-can-exist-in-a...
Insurance companies in the US are also "incredibly tightly controlled". Regulations even specify amounts that can be spent on patient care, administration etc. Health insurers are the only segment of the health care sector in the US where profits are directly limited.
>Which is why the state can and will fund hospitals directly after this crisis.
I don't think that has anything to do with it.
When I mean incredibly tightly controlled, I mean effectively price controls, and very stringent ones at that, and all of them have the state as the main insurer anyways, while AFAIK the US does not insure anyone directly.
The government provides health insurance to many people. 44 million people are insured by Medicare. 74 million people are insured by Medicaid. Over 1 million veterans get their health care provided by the government run VA medical system.
As I pointed out, most countries have a mix of private/public funding a mix of private/public run health care. Lots of people seem to be under the misconception that universal health care coverage is only possible in a Canadian or UK type health care system.
Even non-profit, publicly funded hospitals are feeling the squeeze. Most are paid on a fee-for-service basis. If you cancel all your elective surgeries, there goes a huge chunk of funding. Yet you still need to pay salaries and other overhead.
It's not like non-profit hospitals are suddenly immune to the realities of economics.
Were it not for for-profit healthcare, the US would almost certainly operate this way.
In both public systems I've been a part of, yes there is a hospital budget, but it's paid out through procedures. Don't have anyone in the hospital? No payment.
Mayo earns $12bn per year.
As contrast, a hospitals in Germany for a whole year cost €105bn, with an average total cost per stay (including operations etc ) of 4500€.
https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2018/11...
Can Covid costs (at current patient levels) make up for the loss of other claims? I'm doubtful, especially since some Covid costs are evidently borne by the federal government. The suffering of hospitals is circumstantial evidence that insurers are paying out less overall.
The other thing is that as millions of employees get laid off, millions of health insurance premiums stop getting paid.
Failure mode of a system where healthcare is tied to employment -- works as long as people keep shuffling around, shatters when a systemic black swan comes along.
And no, cobra doesn't address it. It's just a patch. Anyone actually pay cobra for more than a month or two? You quickly realize just how expensive employer group plans can be for an individual.
Well, whatever colour the swan is, a pandemic is no any unprecedented crisis. It's frankly more predictable than large scale earthquakes, but many people simply didn't give a shit to plan for it in advance.
Nassim would like people to stop saying this. I view him as an authority on the subject.
https://mobile.twitter.com/nntaleb/status/124494673873917952...
Meanwhile there may be costs stemming from complications where the treatment was delayed.
https://www.cms.gov/CCIIO/Resources/Files/Downloads/mlr-repo...
Quick edit: since he's been working there for the last 18ish months he has made it clear how poorly run and awful that place is to work for, sentiment is from way before covid.
My wife works at an orthopedic office as a PA and they're talking about how they'll probably have to work weekends just to catch up with the backlog of surgeries.
* Absolutely no overtime for hourly employees (the salaried doctors, of course, do 18-hour shifts) * Doctors in elective departments (dermatology) are furloughed * They've all but confirmed the techs will have layoffs