> All of them were eventually proven wrong. No exceptions.
I live and work in EU (and lived in other places) and I'm pretty sure corporate culture in EU, Japan, Russia is very different from that. There are pros- and cons- sure, but this easy-in/easy-out seems like a very US/Anglophone thing from my POV.
I mean, it’s still possible to be fired, it’s just _a lot_ harder. The relationship between employer and employee doesn’t seem nearly as hostile either.
I'm presuming they meant 'made redundant' rather than 'fired'.
The former is still fairly easy, and just has some process involved, the latter much harder unless gross misconduct can be demonstrated.
It's absolutely true the the UK/EU/etc. have much better rights than the US in this regard, but perhaps the higher pay in the US (at least in tech) pays for that.
> My anecdotes tell me more people leave than get fired, especially the ones with options.
Sure, but that's not the original point. The original point is that the company won't make you any favour if they get a better deal by firing you. So you should do the same and leave if you find a better deal somewhere else.
Hi, former employer here who valued employees over profitability.
It's true for all employers. Your job as a business owner is not to provide jobs to your employees, it's to keep the business afloat and maintain your income. There are limits to how much of a good person you can be, those limits are set by the economic system we exist in. Ignoring these limits will cause your business to fail.
It's a sad view and it's not entirely accurate but it has better predictive power than the rose-tinted glasses you and possibly your employer may be wearing. Profitability is the baseline requirement, all else comes after. That's how a market economy works. If you remain at a stable net-zero that's great as long as nothing ever changes but it means you're extremely vulnerable to any disruption.
To be clear: I'm not even talking about shareholders. This is true for private businesses too, maybe even more so. Profit means reserves, reserves mean being able to survive dips and downturns. But when the market changes you need to adjust and adjustment means the value of an employee can change drastically and it may be better to replace someone who was a great fit for the old market with someone who's a better fit for the new market. Sentimentality is a competitive disadvantage.
You can balk at the morality and decency of this and I'd agree with you but you shouldn't be upset about the persons, you should be upset about the system that is requiring those persons to act this way in order to stay afloat.
> There are limits to how much of a good person you can be, those limits are set by the economic system we exist in.
> you should be upset about the system that is requiring those persons to act this way in order to stay afloat.
How would you change the system or modify the current situation in order to define new limits that are more, let's say, humane?
In the article, there is an example of an ex-Google employee that got fired via email, he couldn't say "Bye" to his colleagues after 20 years of working with them. That doesn't seem like a system with reasonable limits.
> In the article, there is an example of an ex-Google employee that got fired via email, he couldn't say "Bye" to his colleagues after 20 years of working with them. That doesn't seem like a system with reasonable limits.
Until there is a system to easily weed out the people that go ballistic when being laid off, cutting off access is completely fine.
If you want to keep in touch with people outside of work, exchange personal emails.
"How would you change the system" is an above human level question. Winston Churchill said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. The same for capitalism. It is an illusion that it is easy to change a system in which millions of people participate.
The economic forces as painted here are very real but cruelty is optional. It is not very expensive to give an employee the time to say goodbye to colleagues.
> Winston Churchill said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
Sure but he had a good reason to conflate all forms of democracy as if there were no difference between them or ways to give more power to the people in, say, UK's form of democracy. Replacing first-past-the-post voting for example wouldn't require abandoning the entire system of government.
> The same for capitalism.
Sure but again there are important differences between laissez faire capitalism and a social market economy and yet this is used to justify reforming the latter into closer and closer approximations of the former. This also ignores that while the economy at large is clearly some form of "capitalism", communities otherwise operate on more non-capitalist patterns of behavior (e.g. buying rounds at the bar among friends, borrowing tools to your neighbors, BYOBs/potlucks).
Even interactions involving currency (remember markets and currency alone don't define capitalism) don't have to be transactional or profit optimized or be defined in terms of ownership and servitude. Of course things like the gig economy, consumerism and "hustle culture" are built around "capitalism"-ifying those non-capitalist interactions by reframing them as transactional or business opportunities - the most blatant example probably being the widely ridiculed genre of blog post a la "what breaking up with my partner taught me about being a hiring manager".
This. I don't mean it as a criticism towards the employer: if they ignored profit and favoured the employees they would go out of business and eventually that would be bad for the employees as well.
It's just how it is: your employer is not your friend. It's a contract.
"In the market economy the worker sells his services as other people sell their commodities. The employer is not the employee’s lord. He is simply the buyer of services which he must purchase at their market price."
Well, there's a good reason the Mises Institute is a right-wing libertarian think tank that is very blunt about wanting to abolish social welfare and workers' rights.
This quote completely ignores real-world power dynamics and distribution of resources. The employer has capital, the employee does not. The employer can be a Fortune 500 or a mom and pop shop. Even the most highly paid employee can not exert as much political or economical power as Jeff Bezos. At a certain point wealth stops being about what you can buy and starts becoming about what decisions you can influence.
This is the reason unions exist. A Fortune 500 company's board members already engage in collective bargaining. It's only fair for its employees to do the same. And this works at almost any scale, even if at the mom and pop shop the employees may not need to formally unionize because there's few enough of them that they can organize directly.
Sorry, but that's not how the real world works, Mises is a fantasy for kids. That works for maybe contractors, and even that is muddy in cases like Uber etc. But for employees, they sell labor, not services.
Likewise, when someone owns a factory, they don't just own the physical tools and material inputs of production (which they would rent to workers), but they own (control) the whole social structure that is needed to produce, all the human relationships (workers - management - owners - customers) required for the factory to work.
That was Marx's main point, and that's why sane countries have labor laws that regulate this relationship. (But even if everybody was truly selling a service, "free market" would quickly collapse into oligopolies, as it usually does.)
> they don't just own the physical tools and material inputs of production (which they would rent to workers), but they own (control) the whole social structure that is needed to produce
Ayup. That's why when you run a small business an early lesson is that your competitive advantage isn't your intellectual property (because any larger company can come along and find a way to copy that legally) but your business relations and reputation.
I think you are missing the metapoint (maybe purposefully). In the US, even very profitable companies are laying off tons of workers to boost share price and executive compensation. The only reasons I can think of are:
1. They expect the company to be not profitable in near future and they are taking advance steps.
2. They think the workers add nothing to the top line or bottom line and cannot think of anything else that would gainfully make use of their talents.
3. They think the market would like it if they lay people off and hence it is in their selfish motive to keep laying people off.
1 requires a crystal ball and 2 is just incompetence. 3 seems the most likely answer for these layoffs.
If you were running a company at a loss to pay people, you are not running a business, you are a charity. At the same time, if your profitable company wants to move the payoff from labor to shareholders in increasing percentages, your company is detrimental to the society.
Also - every system that has ever existed has had some variant of this.
Output and effectiveness towards market needs has to matter or eventually the system collapses under its own weight. Churn has to happen, or ‘deadwood’ builds up through inertia.
And when the system collapses, it’s like a forest fire with a massive amount of dead wood - it burns everything to the ground, not to grow again for a generation. As compared to periodic wildfires that may suck, but for which sprouts pop back up again in the spring.
> The market as in who needs things, and is willing/able to pay for them, and who provides things and is willing/able to sell them.
That's literally begging the question. There's no intrinsic need for a system to allow for the centralization of wealth to the same extent our present system does, nor for such widespread commodification. It's entirely possible to imagine a system with a different conceptualization of property rights for example -- because we know that property rights have changed over time and were different in different societies. Copyright alone is a great example for how arbitrary property rights are given how drastically it has changed over time.
I’m talking about all economic systems, including the USSR, China, US, European markets, etc.
Fundamentally, for an economy to exist it connects those who produce/have with those who consume/want, mediated by some exchange of value (though in command economies that last part can be remarkably performative).
And fundamentally, if there is no connection to people’s actual needs, and no clearing of old/non-competitive ways to meet those needs there is going to be a very, very bad time. Eventually.
Internally a corporation is a command economy, externally it isn’t of course.
Other command economy examples - gov’t, the USSR, the US during wartime, Russia right now, etc.
Aka when someone in a position of authority says ‘money gets spent here and this way’, regardless of any natural market tendencies (and sometimes with little regard to solvency or pesky things like quality of life).
Obviously the caveat here is that the "market tendencies" aren't defined democractically. It's very much "voting with your dollar" where the voting itself is limited to what options the market provides and the dollar is limited to how much money each market participant has. In that sense monopolization is very much a natural market tendency although most people in favor of "letting the market decide" over government control/intervention would argue that monopolization is bad and actively harmful to a free market.
Joking aside I know, personally, business owners who have consistently acted with integrity and managed to maintain a successful, profitable business over the course of 30+ years, adjacent to the real estate market, surviving 2008, etc. so it's not like they've never faced had time or tough competitors. In that time they have never had layoffs. They've had to cut pay and reduce benefits in lean times, but providing gainful employment is a core value (above profit!!) and it has worked.
> Your job as a business owner is not to provide jobs to your employees, it's to keep the business afloat and maintain your income.
Employee here. There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, I think it is healthy for both the employer and the employee to recognize this as a base of a good professional relationship.
> You can balk at the morality and decency of this and I'd agree with you
Why would you agree? A business is people voluntarily getting together trying to make money. If it fails to do so, why should other people have to step in and pay?
My understanding is that there are a lot of very similar economic systems. There are pros and cons to each of these systems. I don't believe one system or government as truly figured it out.
Folks on HN and reddit like to use other systems as a better system, but they always have some subjective negatives that are pushed aside.
Should employees get their salaries adjusted by inflation once per year?
Why yearly, not monthly? Also what if there is deflation, do people get pay cuts?
A lot of these issues are very easy to criticize on the surface, I don't think many here have ever tried to employee people and work on profit margins.
> Also what if there is deflation, do people get pay cuts?
Yes, put it written form in a contract too.
What I suggest (employer and employee explicitly negotiating inflation/deflation terms) could be better than the standard song and dance we all are used to suffer.
It can change in the other direction too, through management/ownership changes. My previous regime taught me a lot about how I should limit the loyalty I show, but the current lot (buy out six years ago) do a much better job of not being arseholes.
Like all aspects of work/life balance, it is a risk/reward balance that you need to monitor and adjust as circumstances develop.
It's heartwarming to believe in the "family" narrative some companies promote, but it's important to remain pragmatic. This narrative is just a motivational tool to encourage employees to go above and beyond their compensated duties. It's not a binding contract though.
In reality, the power dynamic inherently favors the employer. Once an employee has invested their time and energy, the company holds all the leverage. There's little incentive for the company to uphold their end of this unspoken "deal."
Leadership changes, company priorities shift, and the "family" narrative can quickly fade when faced with financial realities or strategic decisions.
Also maybe it's true for OPs country, not in mine. It costs a lot of money to get rid of someone in my country. So that makes laying people off less profitable.
"it's profitable" hides a world of problem though. "it's profitable" over what timeline - just because an employee isn't doing something profitable this week, doesn't mean they won't be next week. It costs a lot to fire someone even in "at will" countries where you literally just tell them to F-Off
I have a friend who was laid-off from Google in Switzerland. The guy got salary for months but wasn't allowed in the office. So stupid. Seems like this "we must do lay-offs" is such a modus operandi for us big tech they would do it even if it cost them far more than utilize the pretty talented developer.
> So stupid. Seems like this "we must do lay-offs" is such a modus operandi for us big tech they would do it even if it cost them far more than utilize the pretty talented developer.
Unless they consider that it is still profitable because they will stop paying him after those 2-3 months. Which would not be stupid.
When saying “it’s profitable to lay someone off”, isn’t it implied that it’s profitable in a long-term perspective? Otherwise, it would according to the definition to be profitable to lay someone of as soon as they take their first lunch break.
Note that I didn't claim that non-profit companies prioritize employees. I said that when a for-profit company prioritizes something else than profits then it's not acting as a for-profit company.
> Maybe that's true for your employer. But it's bold to generalize. Certainly not true for the company where I work. And a quite sad view.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a business person, so I have no idea what the correct fancy terms are for any of these things.)
If the company had to choose between survival thanks to firing someone ("recovery to positive" predicted after all legal unemployment stuff has been paid), vs loyalty keeping people on payroll risking bankruptcy[1] if the current trend continues, then I would expect them to choose fire-now-and-secure-survival, rather than don't-fire-because-i'm-sure-it-will-all-work-out-somehow-if-i-stay-loyal.
After all, as an employee, I would also choose assured survival (moving companies) over loyalty (staying in the same company) the second I realize staying at the current company isn't beneficial for me (i.e. what the company pays me vs cost of living, not enough for savings, too little time to spend with family, always way too tired, etc).
If your company would choose loyalty over being profitable, then that's interesting for sure. (EDIT: Though there's some companies that just run at a loss off the founder's savings, so it could be possible. I'm not denying your claims, just find them unusual.)
[1]: Either because company is already on negative profit ("debt"? no idea if that is the correct word), or because current profit isn't enough to please VC and risks losing their support which would then put them on a negative profit situation.
It is a relatively safe generalisation from my experience, both direct and through family & friends, even though I don't think it is true for my current circumstances.
The regime I'm currently under genuinely seems to value me and the others around. I've been afforded quite a lot of understanding with regard to unplanned time off (and sometimes missed deadlines) due to dealing with some personal issues and looking after ill family (damn near lost the old man a couple of weeks ago, scariest day of my existence thus far). Admittedly there are some things that I have a very low bus count on, so they can't just easily kick me out or risk irritating me to the point where I chose to go, but it is more than just that.
Of course if it came down to me or the whole company I'd be dropped quickly as is only sensible, so there is a limit to how much I can count on such loyalty (or if it _isn't_ loyalty, their feeling that they need to keep me around).
Previous regime¹ was quite different. I wouldn't have trusted some of them enough to lend them a fiver³, and when I got news of the current lot coming in I was very close to telling them to fuck off⁴ in most unprofessional terms even though I didn't have anywhere lined up to jump directly to.
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[1] I've effectively worked for that same entity for many years², though there have been a couple of complete changes of ownership & company name, the usual staff turnover overall, and changes to the product line-up.
[2] due in part to a shocking lack of ambition :)
[3] At one point I found out my line manager was leaving the day he did, via an email to the whole company about leaving drinks, management had known for at least weeks. Also working piles of unpaid overtime on a project then being bitched about by the CEO for not being present at 0900 on the dot one morning, was a good indication of how much my efforts were respected (I started working to rule at that point, in at 0859, out at 1731, no overtime without agreement up-front it would be paid for).
[4] What had stopped me some days earlier was the brexit vote: that implied potential economic uncertainty which, to my many risk-averse personality segments, demanded I be a little more cautious for a time.
Companies aren't people. Even if your current direct boss wouldn't do this, they won't be your boss forever, and there's always somebody further up the chain who can overrule them (or fire them too).
Voyage to Kazohinia by Sándor Szathmári. I guess it's fairly unknown outside Hungary. Published first in the forties it's still my favourite utopia/dystopia.
