We have normalised firing of people. I don't know about the "developed" countries where people have social security, but for countries like India where there is no social security and stigma is associated with being laid off, it is a very difficult situation.
I remember asking few years ago to my sister's husband, who runs our family business, what keeps him awake at night with regards to business. His answer, "Not messing up". I was expecting something like "Funding", "Losing sales" etc. But hearing his answer surprised me. Because it sounded personal. So I asked him what does he mean? And he said, "The company has about 100 employees, but I am not just responsible for 100 employees. I am responsible for about 400 to 600 people. Each employee has a family. They make their future plans because they have an income from this company. They have to fund their kids education, they have to look after their aging parents, they might have taken a loan for daughter's marriage or for a house. They are relying on me. If I mess up, I affect lives of 400 to 600 people. That keeps me awake."
Some how firing/laying-off has been trivialised.
We spent decades in the US smashing unions, smashing pensions (replacing them with more volatile instruments like 401Ks) and made at-will employment dangerous for both sides of the equation.
Firing has been trivialized for decades. This is not new, and the current wave is minuscule compared to 2008, 2000, and previous. The worst is yet to come.
A 401(k) usually allows me to choose what I invest my money in (including bonds), and can be rolled over to a new employer easily. And it’s my money once it’s in my account, not my employer’s money. They can’t require me to work for a certain period of time to get it out, and don’t pay me less to compensate for offering the retirement benefit.
I’m not super well informed on what his options were; I’m sure he had different retirement benefits via staying with GE post-merger, but if anyone is interested I could get more details.
EDIT: Based on memory and what kind of work he did, I’m almost certain it was this item in the “General Electric timeline” Wikipedia page: “GE Aerospace Division sold to Martin Marietta, now Lockheed Martin”
It's not for nothing they killed em in favor of 401ks, themselves whittled down over the years (employer contributions going down, kicking in after a time, only getting paid at the end of year, etc).
You might be too young to remember the facts on the ground, leaving the conversation to start with, "Why would an employee in the tech sector..."
They might not, but that position presumes that the person has only experienced the 'upside' of the industry. Why would ANY employee in ANY industry prefer it in boom times? They wouldn't. But that in and of itself is very short-term opportunistic thinking. It may still not overall be the position one wants to take, but that also presumes that there is only a binary decision to be assessed, and policy/regulation is rarely lacking in granularity.
Pensions carry their own benefits and detriments. As someone whose been in tech for 25 years, I'm largely ambivalent at this stage, but I suspect many aren't, and are asking more pointed questions to themselves.
But I agree they pretty much only have upsides - no risk of the pension fund going bankrupt (would be good right about now in the UK!) and no way for previous generations to steal from the current one, which is basically what all defined benefit pensions are doing now.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/10/republican-plan-cut-...
Not to sound crass here but it seems like you're fishing for virtue. Hiring and firing are normal. A company of 20,000 firing 20% of it's workforce sounds major but that's the industry. It's normalized because it is normal. The field of software engineering is so fungible 20% of employees losing their job is nearly meaningless in the current job market because you can throw and rock and find another seat to warm the next day. It's not like Ford closing a factory.
In other words, you need to relax and get out of your head a little. This industry is nothing like the factories. When 20% of factory workers lose their jobs everyone rightfully panics because it's not as easy to get another factory job (at least anymore...here in the west). 20% of tech employees getting laid off from a company is a nothingburger. 99% of these people will be able to take two weeks of free time and find another job for the same (or often better) pay. This is the definition of trivial.
Based on this, I suspect it's highly likely the hubris in this comment will not age well.
2) No idea. My Indian contractor coworkers never seemed to care. It's the H1Bs that panic during a layoff (understandably).
3) I don't think it will, that's why I get mine while the gettin' is good and hopefully have enough to not worry about the future whenever the FAANGs finally succeed at driving wages into the ground. However, given there are nearly 4 jobs for every engineer currently in the field according to the BLS I'm not worried at all about the next decade. I'll just continue to stack cash and re-evaluate every once in a while.
... In the US.
This feels like those addenda where medical trials keep on showing some clinical effect and people in the comments have to add, some clinical effect... in mice.
The US software landscape is shaped by a unique VC landscape that has not been reproduced anywhere else in the world.
If you have lived through the dot com bubble or the 2008 sub-prime crisis you will also be aware that funding can dry up as quickly as it is thrown at you.
At the moment at least in Europe I still see a hot market for contracting roles but for permanent roles it is in no way what you describe of 'find another warm seat the next day'.
But > you can throw and rock and find another seat to warm the next day
Ummm, nope, not everyone's resume is pristine or has a portfolio to share. Lots of immensely talented people are at companies far outside Silicon Valley, both the place and the spirit. Not everyone can point to some app or site for public consumption, lots of work is on internal tools or programs or DevOps that no outsider sees or knows about, or is protected by all kinds of non-disclosure and IP restrictions. Some great people have an awful boss who would never provide a recommendation. There's a million reasons why getting a new job can be hard, be grateful that it appears easy from your perspective but recognize many, many extremely capable and talented people aren't in the same situation.
And as fast as companies hire (which people celebrate), companies can quickly layoff too (which we lament).
So just as it is normalized to do fast-hiring, such is the case for fast-layoffs/firings.
You seem to ignore both the trend shifts in factory jobs and software jobs. Factory workers once had exactly the same status as you describe here:
> 99% of these people will be able to take two weeks of free time and find another job for the same (or often better) pay
Also, software engineers (at the big scale) are slowly but steadily loosing the glorious position in the workforce market they once had.
Deleted Comment
In Europe where firing is almost impossible, hiring is a very tedious process. Companies are big and look financially stable because the little ones cannot survive or dont enjoy the same monopoly / legal protections.
If a company is not useful to society, it should go down. If you're not a good fit with the company, you should find your own way or a better company.
Don't idealize employment and companies. They are only tools on our path to wealth and freedom
> If you can be fired easily, you will find a job easily.
Unless it is another economical crisis and nobody is hiring?
> In Europe where firing is almost impossible
It is called "job security" - if you hired somebody, you "promised" them to pay a wage. If they are not needed anymore, you need to keep on promise and pay a wage. For at least some time. E.g. a few month of salary seems reasonable because a person has planned his future with you, now he needs to find a new job which will take some time.
So it is not impossible in Europe. It is expensive at most because it only looks reasonable.
> Companies are big and look financially stable
Unless you count all the mom and pop cafes all over the Mediterranean? All the Scandinavian startups? And etc.?
Of course employment is an exchange of promises between employer and employees to bring stability for less money and less risks. But if the exchange benefits both sides, there is no reason to forbid both parties to negotiate whatever they prefer. In Europe there are too many legal hurdles (called "protection" of course they're going to choose a positive word !)
If there is an economic crisis and you forbid firing, the only solution is to close companies. Societe re organizes itself at each crisis, so the people laid off need to find new ways
I realize I speak from a privileged position as a software developer. But never since the first day that I stepped into an office as a professional software developer in June of 1996 did I “plan a future” with a company.
My plan was always to use where I worked as a stepping stone for my next job. I spent my first two years saving money and building my resume. I have spent most of my career “with my running shoes on”. Meaning I’m always prepared for a layoff or to leave when the pay/bullshit ratio is going in the wrong direction.
My employer owes me nothing besides to pay me for the hours I worked. When that arrangement isn’t working for either of us, we both have agency and the ability to terminate that arrangement.
> Unless it is another economical crisis and nobody is hiring?
I lived through both the 2000 crash and 2008-2011. The 2000 crash wasn’t bad if you had both skills and was working in many major cities in the US as just a regular old enterprise developer working for profitable non tech companies.
2008 was worse. But as a developer, you could find a contract somewhere if you had a network.
If there is another economic crisis and nobody is hiring, preventing companies to fire people will make the crisis even worse.
> It is called "job security"
An outdated concept of the XX century. No such thing in the post-industrial society.
> Unless you count all the mom and pop cafes all over the Mediterranean?
They are closing by thousands now, like in every other economic crisis. And Scandinavian startups — what Scandinavian startups? (Finland and Estonia are not Scandinavian countries, they have somewhat more business-friendly environment).
I don't know where you got this idea, but, at least in tech, the most infamous 7 rounds of whiteboard interviews stories I've heard are from Silicon Valley, not Europe. The company I work for (a Romanian branch of a US company - and yes, Romania has all the same legal protections against t firing as most of Europe) typically does one tech interview and one HR interview and that's it.
Assuming you mean the European Union by "Europe", this is 27 countries with 27 labour laws. I don't think this can be generalized. Only trade laws were unified in the EU.
The labour laws diversity is made even wider if you include non EU countries like Switzerland or the Balkans.
Just as an example Denmark follows the concept of Flexisecurity[1], easy to fire, but there is a good government safety net which prevents people from falling into poverty, while trying as hard as possible to find them a new income.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity
Good for Denmark ! Generalizations are never true. Specialized descriptions with all the cases covered on the other hand, are never read.
In New Zealand it is fairly easy to start a company (in the sense that the required paperwork isn’t too difficult). It’s easy to hire people, but firing is hard.
Why would ease firing mean ease hiring? Why would companies failing easily mean start ups are simple?
It’s not so much that companies need to be idealised, but that people need to be treated with a minimum level of care.
but also, there is a limited amount of capital in the economy, and so propping an "unhealthy" company up with debt will crowd out new, potentially successful businesses. If there are enough zombie companies around this is enough to paralyze an entire economy.
The general observation is that the US has less worker stability, but also bounces back faster than European countries. And the poster child for zombie companies strangling the economy by hoovering up all the credit is post-bubble Japan.
People do not need to be treated, they're not little babies
How exactly is hiring a very tedious process? Seemed quite fast and easy to me.
And btw, it's not that hard to fire a wrong hire. You have few months to do so basically for any reason at all, and afterwards, you can still do it, if you have a good reason to do so.
GP made a huge generalization by saying "in europe" while talking about labour laws. It's like me saying "in asia, (something about the labour market)", there is no such thing.
Hiring/firing/Employee-rights are very different between Spain and Czechia.
finding a new job you will compete with people that have this 3 month notice so most of the companies plan hiring around it. also if you are unemployed in europe it will look really bad during your interviews.
now compare that to USA. you give 2 week notice, job market is very fluid so you can likely find a new job 2 week after stay there a few months helping the company and then use that time to apply to a new job in a better company.
Obviously the french model might be better for low earners/blue collars that do not have a job security. but for everyone else it is really hard to move to another company, managers know that too so they dont need to carrot you into a raise or a promotion as much as they do in US.
Typically here you have 3 to 6 months probation period where you can be fired at any moment. Then your rights increase with your tenure.
The other big difference is that when you leave a job, you usually have 1 to 3 months of notice period while in the US that tends to only last a couple of weeks.
Overall this gives people a lot more security and I think we have a much better balance because of it, at least in the tech industry.
Industries with higher turnover (like hospitality) typically only hire employees as contractors so they can fire them at any time.
Sure you need to vet your candidates more carefully, because you cannot fire them right away without reason (although these law vary within the 27 nations of the EU). But:
1. there are limited contacts. So if you don't wanna have the risk, you are free to make shorter contacts and pay people more so the good people are willing to take those. This has the downside that they are free to go to your competitor as well at the end of the contract. Everything comes with it's downsides.
2. Hiring random people and firing them a month later does not make it easier for the employers. If employers vet their potential employees more carefully, everybody wins. Sure, finding and selecting the right person is hard. But even if you could hire and fire villy nilly, that would waste your companies time. Every person you hire will take the company into a new direction, one bad person can poison the social climate, hurt your company etc. So hiring carefree is not a good idea in any case.
3. In hiring not just the employer takes a risk, the employee takes risks too. They might have to move, they might have to buy a bicycle, a car, a public transport ticket to commute, they plan their lives on the promised employment and wage. It is only fair that they get the time to reorganise if you let them go.
Tell me you’re an American without telling me you’re an American ;)
What happens in a recession? When tens of thousands of people are fired easily across an economy they're not going to find another job quickly.
Making firing more difficult puts a mandate on companies to be a little more responsible when growing their headcount. As a consequence they're less vulnerable to wild swings as a result of unforeseen circumstances.
> Companies are big and look financially stable because the little ones cannot survive or dont enjoy the same monopoly / legal protections.
Big companies are favoured in hundreds of ways. Leveraging other income streams to price dump their way into a dominant position and creative methods of lowering their tax burden being just two. The answer to this isn't to strip worker protections but to remove those loopholes and encourage competition rather than monopolisation.
Many laws around workers rights are already relaxed for smaller companies.
> If a company is not useful to society, it should go down.
Absolutely, but most societies wouldn't be able to function if this was the case. Most economies simply aren't resilient enough to allow large companies to go down. I feel like it's fairly intuitive that once companies in certain sectors grow large enough they can become an essential part of the nation's infrastructure. That only leaves a few options:
- Continue bailing them out
- Nationalise them
- Prevent them from reaching that size in the first place
I don't see how making it easier to lay people off would advance any of these. Instead it only encourages companies to engage in risky behaviour and grow beyond their ability to sustain themselves.
> Don't idealize employment and companies. They are only tools on our path to wealth and freedom
We've created a system predicated on the fact that not everyone can be wealthy. I don't think it's moral to then say that the solution to being treated poorly is to just become wealthy.
And if you can find a job easily, you can credibly threaten to decamp for leverage. (Or, if your boss is a dick, just leave.)
I'm American. My bias shows. But I think an easy-to-fire, easy-to-hire model is far superior to the incumbency-biased systems which make hiring and firing an Olympic sport. We lack a strong-enough social net underneath it all, necessary to be humane and maintain social stability. But that seems an easier fix than reforming an entire commercial culture.
Does it? To an outsider, workers rights seem to be regressing.
France has good job security rules, from what I've heard. The UK, not so much.
Once you've completed two years, you are entitled to a consultation process if the company wants to make redundancies. Those positions cannot be filled for six months after a redundancy. HR departments can reword and change descriptions though so if they really wanted to fill the position, they could, but from what I've seen they mostly change it after six months anyway.
If you're unlucky and have just started a position, you can be dropped easily, no consultation, but the rules of redundancy above remain.
However, having spent some time on the other end, doing interviews, hiring is a lot more expensive than firing. One month of consultation vs delays to projects, training of new starters, retention of employees and talent are far more valuable than an easy firing process. Never doubt the value of your experience to a company, any employer who does ignore that value isn't worth working for as they're delusional and likely to fail soon.
Yes, hiring is a very tedious.
Europe is not a single country, anyway, here's what happen in France:
Firing is tedious, but not impossible. Hiring people is easy, but you enter into competition with higher salaries - like the US - for remote jobs.
> Firing easily and hiring easily are two sides of the same coin.
Not exactly, they diverge when firing is made more difficult.
To fire in France you need a really good reason well justified, and prepare your company for the Prud'hommes trial. Of course you could say "but most companies are big and have HR teams and lawyers dedicated to this, whereas the employee is all alone", but that's also my point about big vs. small companies and legal protections
that would only ever be true in whichever fantasy world where the managers and people-in-charge made wise and just decisions.
Plenty of 'rare talent' that is near irreplaceable is fired every single day by managers that don't know any better, and their niche talents make it very difficult to find new job prospects.
Yes, like 1930s America.
I guess you mean “you can be easily hired” rather than “you will find a job easily”. Very different things.
You have consultation requirements many places, to ensure that it's actually a genuine redundancy, but a company willing to offer a reasonably fair payout and who can demonstrate a genuine need to cut costs or a genuine lack of work for certain staff will generally not have much of a problem carrying out a redundancy most places in Europe.
> In Europe where firing is almost impossible, hiring is a very tedious process.
This is, at best, an anecdote. I'm charitably saying anecdote to avoid calling it utter bullshit. The average hiring process at companies I'm familiar with -- in the UK, France, Germany, Finland, the Czech Republic, Portugal and Greece, so I guess it's a reasonably large sample -- is no more complicated than the hiring process at Google or Facebook. And, much like in the US, if you stay away from the big players -- like Google or Facebook -- the average hiring "process" is a technical interview + a short interview with the hiring manager and HR. Popular enough companies may do a phone screening but that's about it.
Firing someone for bad performance is not "almost impossible". I have, unfortunately, had to sign off on that a couple of times. What is almost impossible is firing someone for bullshit reasons and writing it off as "a bad fit".
Of course there are legal protection in place: if you are laid off and can't find work -- for example, because you relocated to stay with your current employer when they moved offices, and were promptly laid off afterwards, in a new town with somewhat uncertain prospects -- the solution you're offered, in most countries, is not stop being poor, lol, but various forms of social protection so you don't starve before your next interview. Consequently, yes, it's important to make it difficult to fire people because they don't bend to toxic management or poor working conditions, otherwise that'd just be sponsoring incompetent management.
> Companies are big and look financially stable because the little ones cannot survive or dont enjoy the same monopoly / legal protections.
That is not even an anecdote. Except for Eastern Europe, where the Iron Curtain interrupted the history of most businesses, there are plenty of small companies, in every country, that have been operating more or less without interruption since the 1800s (and usually the interruptions were on account of one of the World Wars). There are four of these within a ten-minute walking distance from where I'm staying.
Deleted Comment
Where exactly in Europe?
It's like saying "in Asia is almost impossible to do X"
Europe is a 750 million people continent formed by 51 different countries including Russia and UK
Be more specific please.
In Spain it's easy to fire, for example.
Their average salaries are 20% lower than the French ones, even though in France firing is hard, and their unemployment rate is almost double.
You theory has some flaws apparently.
Yes generalizations are never true. Even talking about one country is a generalization and you will fail at making a statement about it. The best way to not make a mistake is to not say anything
There is no good reason to separate Europe from Asia, it's all one big continent. Your theory is also flawed :(Maybe the employee got in in the first place because hiring and firing were easy. If you made it difficult, the employee wouldn't have been hired in the first place. Then it doesn't matter if you have an economic crisis, the person is out of job anyway. We need to let companies fire employees to survive the crisis, and let newly fired people re organize their life and create the companies that will compete and destroy the current ones
If at-will employment wasn’t available, companies would react by only hiring when absolutely necessary, and there would be fewer available jobs.
Plus, even in the US, some companies offer pensions and are known for almost never laying off or firing people. So you do have the choice of stability if you’re willing to limit the companies you work for. Startups and publicly-traded companies are not the place for those who want a guaranteed job.
I'm glad tech companies have very simple interview procedures at the moment.
In retrospective, it kinda had to fail. Production, the heart of economy didn't have to listen to market forces. Market forces were banned. Nobody was laid off, but this was an illusion.
To paint even more grim picture, in the 1990ths when people were laid off, first time in their lives, suicide and drug epidemic was soaring. We need to normalize layoffs and tell people that that is going to happen anyway and not the end of the world. Companies will fail. This is normal, this is their function, fail small and protect big.
I don't think it has been. I don't think you can generalize the sentiment of people at a company from the HN post about a PR announcement for how they're cutting staff. When a company announces layoffs they're telling the markets, investors, and the public that they need to make a significant change. That doesn't tell you anything about how the founders, board, HR team, or anyone else feel about the layoffs.
FWIW the people I know who work in HR are usually gutted when they have to make jobs redundant. Founders and boards are less so, but usually because they believe it's a choice between jobs cuts and company collapse. Both these things are from very limited exposure to companies making cuts though.
Perhaps there are companies and people out there who think it's trivial. That would be sad.
This is something I heard many times. And the most of the time, companies with this motto are underpaying and don't give a proper wage to employees to make any passive income or any investment to become less depended on the job. And this motto becomes an excuse for overtime and workload in bad times. A professional work should not be responsible/aware of any daughter's wedding or personal loans. Developed countries have massive taxes to support you on unemployment. Risk of layoff must be part of your salary expectation. Young Startups always pay more than stable companies.
--
That being said, I'm not sure the entire tech industry wouldn't benefit from less friction to switching - hiring is an insanely expensive and very low-signal process - spend 200 hours hiring a person and maybe they fit and work well, maybe they don't.
For employees, tech interviews are an insanely time consuming and stressful process where you know they aren't getting much signal. Not unusual to spend 20-60 hours in interviews for just one position. Look for a new job while you are employed? Hope you want 80 hour weeks...and same thing - no idea til you get in there what the culture is actually like, who was blowing smoke at you, if it matches your strengths...
And yet, still we continue down the same path of brutal on-sites, workers that feel stuck in a crappy job but definitely have skills to offer in a better place, etc
I find interviewing to be pretty frictionless for the most part. The hardest part is setting some time aside for for leetcode prep.
a takehome can easily be 10+ hours
onsites have gotten a bit shorter since they went remote, but are still a lot. Let's say 8 hours. That means 5 companies, a whole work week to fit into full work weeks..