24 ms·

Ask HN: Who is firing?

1087 points by wellworld 10y ago

The startup I work at will soon be undergoing an exodus of staff due to a failure in leadership and management by the founders. Really painful, sad, situation for all involved. So, I figure if we're allowed to talk about who is hiring, why not the other way around? At the very least, we can get a pulse on those companies which smells like roses on the outside, and reek of something more earthy on the inside.

pathompong 10y ago
Thomson Reuters is. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-01/thomson-reuters-earnings-top-estimates-on-growth-in-americas http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-01/thomson-re...
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  The newspaper / print media industry generally is doing abysmally poorly. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/28/business/media/buyouts-wall-street-journal-bad-news-for-newspapers.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/28/business/media/buyouts-wal... Submitted yesterday, didn't go anywhere: https://news.ycombinator.co/item?id=12834583 https://news.ycombinator.co/item?id=12834583 I've been picking up newspapers and magazines and been quietly horrified at how thin they are. I'm no fan of advertising, but I know it's how they pay the bills, and there are no ads there. The Chicago Tribune is trying to keep their "news hole" at no more than 50%, and AFAICT, are failing. Even with the Cubs at the World Series (and the Trib pimping that for all its worth), the sports section has virtually no advertising. Most noticeable is the lack of classic retail: beer, wine, alcohol, automobiles, consumer electronics (a periodic Fry's ad excepted), clothing (with a few exceptions), etc. Some home services (windows, siding, etc.), and occasional furniture. But overall, terrifically thin. Time Magazine as of September was similarly famished-looking. Reminds me of running into a friend you'd not seen for a while, with a fatal disease. It's a visual shock.
  - Animats 10y ago
    The Chicago Tribune renamed its holding company "Tronc" a few months back. It didn't help. Gannett just declined to buy them a few hours ago. Tribune Tower is being converted to condos.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      I hadn't heard of Gannett's withdrawal. That's going to sting. I'm aware of the Trib Tower sale. Its progress dominated the Trib's business pages for about six months.
  - eghad 10y ago
    Sorry to dump on your aside, but the media arm isn't affected. The Finance/Risk news (for financial clients) division is the one being downsized, and they were profitable. The parent mentions it, but here's the brief from their outlet: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-thomsonreuters-results-idUSKBN12W3PE http://www.reuters.com/article/us-thomsonreuters-results-idU...
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      Hey, accurate info is good info, I appreciate that. Which does though raise the question of how it is newswires (Reuters, UPI, AP) are succeeding where direct media outlets aren't. Or is it just that the pain is there but less than (in T/R's case) the finance/risk arm?
      - garysieling 10y ago
        The two big TR business units are legal and financial, and both industries pay for access to information when it helps their businesses. I worked on some of the legal products, and customers were much more sensitive to completeness and accuracy of information they could obtain than the average person with a newspaper. Even with "free" news products people would also pay for alerts.
  - majewsky 10y ago
    I had a similar thing with games magazines a while back. I was subscribed to GameStar (then one of Germany's largest computer game periodicals) in my teenage years, and it always weighed in at about 200-250 pages. I unsubscribed in 2006 as I was too occupied with studying, but picked up an issue in 2011 from the newspaper stand out of nostalgia. I was shocked that it had shrunk down to some 100 pages, and most of the tests were about free-2-play junk. Whole sections were gone, too (e.g. hardware tests IIRC). It's like one of those childhood memories that look really bad in retrospect.
  - driverdan 10y ago
    > The newspaper / print media industry generally is doing abysmally poorly. They're not doing well but I wouldn't use the term abysmal. Print media is still declining but a lot of publishers are offsetting much of that loss with online revenue.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      I'd love to see your sources on that, because everything I've seen says otherwise. From 2013, but I'm not finding anything more recent: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/this-is-the-scariest-statistic-about-the-newspaper-business-today/274125/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/this-is-... "In 2012, newspapers lost $16 in print ads for every $1 earned in digital ads." A trend that's getting worse -- it had been 10:1 in 2011, according to Pew Research. Similarly, also 2013: http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2013/newspapers-stabilizing-but-still-threatened/newspapers-by-the-numbers/ http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2013/newspapers-stabilizing-b... And 2014: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/04/28/decline_of_newspapers_hits_a_milestone_print_revenue_is_lowest_since_1950.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/04/28/decline_of_ne... The latter shows a plot of ads revenues from 1950 forward, showing it falling of a cliff in 2005. Online hasn't made a whit of a difference.
- jbob2000 10y ago
  Huh. Strange. They just opened an office in Toronto and posted all these dev job ads... I applied but got rejected, guess it was for the better.
williswee 10y ago
WSJ is too http://www.politico.com/media/story/2016/11/wall-street-journal-feels-the-pain-004838 http://www.politico.com/media/story/2016/11/wall-street-jour...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Keverw 10y ago
Twitter is firing the people who worked on Vine. http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2016/10/27/twitter-strong-q3-fires-employees-shutters-vine/ http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2016/10/27/twitter-strong-q3... Really love how you are doing the opposite for this thread. I guess It helps people get prospective on both sides :)
- wellworld 10y ago
  Thanks! I'm really tempted to post about the suffering, near-fraud and deceit in my company, but I figure it'll be all over the news soon.
  - a3n 10y ago
    Careful. It doesn't matter enough to risk your wellbeing.
    - yarou 10y ago
      The truth always matters. I'd rather be a truthful mendicant than a lavishly rich liar.
      - a3n 10y ago
        To the point of winning a lawsuit but losing everything else? It doesn't matter in the sense that most of these disrupters are just going to disappear from lack of need anyway. They're so much spaghetti, thrown on the wall by VC to see what sticks. The lie is that most of it matters.
      - xyzzy123 10y ago
        Mm how about a polite, forgiving person who is decently well off? I would say that it pays to be forthright, but understanding. Granted there are exceptions. Bear in mind that one person's "unvarnished truth" might come from a lack of experience or high expectations that are difficult to meet at scale and in a commercial environment. There are generally a lot of tradeoffs being made in companies. A "tire fire" of php might be compensated for by testing and deployment practices or hell it might just be a fun place to work if you can live with the mess. On the other hand, you might have "architect driven design" where everything is a diamond on paper but the implementation is 8 kinds of design pattern wrong. Or you might have a great technical team and codebase but no actual value proposition (the funny part is that success itself invites people and pressures that unsuccessful products don't have - some of the best places I've worked had unsuccessful products but great management and teams... once success and revenue kick in, suddenly there are a lot more suits and stakeholders)... Or you could have some kind of situation where not only is the work pointless, the organisation is so utterly dysfunctional that... you'd definitely leave if it didn't pay so damn well. One person's "super messed up" is another person's "this is exactly where I want to work". Some people function well in less structured environments and some in more... so what is truth versus just a perspective? (agree there are exceptions where the truth must be told. I draw the line at not getting paid...)
chrissnell 10y ago
Back in the first dotcom bubble, we had FuckedCompany.com. It tracked these sorts of things on a daily basis.
- prawn 10y ago
  The creator of said site posts on HN from time to time, under pud. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pud https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pud
  - rnugent 10y ago
    Pud is Phil Kaplan. He made a few bucks on AdBright, got married and still hacks up wild ideas that mostly whiff. Plays the drums.
    - prawn 10y ago
      Can only assume this is sarcasm or some definition of "whiff" I don't know. He's had FC, AdBright, TinyLetter and DistroKid - wish I had a track record that strong with my projects!
- malbs 10y ago
  Ahh FuckedCompany.com I remember when I sat in an interview for a position at marchFIRST in Melbourne, Australia. And when it came time in the interview for them to ask "Have you got any questions for us?" "Yeah, look this is kind of awkward, but I've seen marchFIRST mentioned quite a number of times on this website called fuckedcompany.com... Is that indicative of any issues I should be aware about?" "Oh, don't worry about that, thats just our american parent company" "Oh great" So I accepted the offer, worked off-site for 3 months, and then marchFIRST went chapter 11. Should have paid more attention to that damned website.
  - 0xmohit 10y ago
    marchFIRST -- it even has a Wikipedia entry [0]! marchFIRST was a Nasdaq traded public company whose peak stock price reached $52. By the time the company filed for bankruptcy, it traded for pennies ($0.16 on March 28, 2001). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MarchFirst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MarchFirst
innodb1 10y ago
cognizant is firing people in US, top level cleanup
- mavelikara 10y ago
  At what level?
  - curiousgal 10y ago
    The top.
    - Naritai 10y ago
      Not sure what else mavelikara was expecting :)
      - mavelikara 10y ago
        I was expecting titles of people who were let go.
- douche 10y ago
  Nice, we're working on trying to sell them some software. I wonder if that is why we haven't a whole lot the last couple weeks...
- giis 10y ago
  Is this because of their recent scams ? https://www.americanbazaaronline.com/2016/09/30/cognizant-facing-corruption-charges-in-us-appoints-rajeev-mehta-as-new-president417788/ https://www.americanbazaaronline.com/2016/09/30/cognizant-fa...
pknerd 10y ago
This should be a monthly thread.
- atom_enger 10y ago
  Yeah seems like something we should track along with hiring. Great thing to know about if you're on the market.
  - stephengillie 10y ago
    What about the number of throwaway accounts that might necessitate? It would be better to have a more anonymous means to announce that your employer is firing.
    - jacalata 10y ago
      Well, hopefully the site is written well enough to scale the users database if necessary.
      - boulos 10y ago
        Besides, this would only be X00 per month at best (it's rare that any post, get much more than a few hundred comments) and quite likely tens on average. There are certainly more than 100 new HN accounts per month. I second the motion ;).
  - monkeyshelli 10y ago
    I agree. Get the other side of the coin as well if you don't have option to talk with some of the people "over beverages".
workerIbe 10y ago
I'm the 3rd Architect to be lucky to work with our VP of Product in the last 6 months, the other 2 no longer work here, he seems to end up pissed off Everytime we meet, we'll see...
- maverick_iceman 10y ago
  Which company?
  - hactually 10y ago
    I wouldn't recommend he answer that. VP's are a lot easier to identify than a TL or similar
ronilan 10y ago
Seems like a lot of bay area companies are "firing on all cylinders" but Tesla is clearly not.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- jbyers 10y ago
  rimshot I can't tell if that's an electric car joke or a condemnation of Tesla or both.
- kainolophobia 10y ago
  Does this mean Tesla is hiring or firing?
alasdair_ 10y ago
The DNC. At least once the election is over so it doesn't look terrible for all concerned.
- dgc 10y ago
  I imagine that will be the RNC as well. Kind of a tradition in an election year ^_^
  - greglindahl 10y ago
    A few of the DNC staff did not pass the "newspaper test" of ethics.
  - gragas 10y ago
    The head of the DNC was already fired from CNN for directly colluding with Hillary Clinton (she gave HRC questions for the democratic debates ahead of time). I have no idea how Bernie still supports her. She literally cheated against him to get the nomination. This is not speculation. It's direct evidence of corruption in the DNC (and it revolves around guess who---Hillary Clinton). http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/us/politics/donna-brazile-wikileaks-cnn.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/us/politics/donna-brazile-...
    - myf01d 10y ago
      >I have no idea how Bernie still supports her. She literally cheated against him to get the nomination. Everyone has a price.
    - rconti 10y ago
      It's not cheating if that's how the game is played.
- 64212 10y ago
  Very horrible people in that committee...
- patmcguire 10y ago
Animats 10y ago
Is it time to start holding Pink Slip Parties [1] again? [1] http://sfgirl.com/index_last.html http://sfgirl.com/index_last.html
- patmcguire 10y ago
  Finance had some crazy times in NYC right after the housing bubble burst... friends would go to parties with color-coded wristbands for if you were hiring or looking to be hired.
- CalChris 10y ago
  I went to one of those. It was hilarious.
  - walshemj 10y ago
    Back in the day I went to first Tuesday and those with badges for VC/Investors got swamped. I managed to nervously pitched to one guy and thought "he looks familiar" looked down and saw his name badge was a single word "rothschild" :-) He looked like Nathan Rothschild (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Mayer_Rothschild https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Mayer_Rothschild) who was the UK's banker during the Napoleonic wars
frogstomp19 10y ago
Not technically "firing" I suppose but all of the dev org in Atlanta and SF, including myself, were laid off at athenahealth last week. Something like 120 people. Sucks.
- planteen 10y ago
  Sorry to hear that. :(
- tbrooks 10y ago
  What about the Austin office?
  - dabernathy89 10y ago
    I've been seeing job listings for the Austin office repeatedly for the last few weeks, so it'd surprise me if they were cutting staff there.
  - frogstomp19 10y ago
    Still alive! They consolidated to Watertown (Boston), Austin, and India.
- withdavidli 10y ago
  The entire org?? Why? I recruited for a company that started a few innovation centers around the country. Part me now wonders why they needed all those devs. This was around 3 new centers that hired about 70-100+ each in mostly non tech hubs. The way tech advanced in the last 3 years I'm sure most of their work is or fastly becoming obselete.
  - debacle 10y ago
    Probably using a new platform and/or being bought.
- kristianp 10y ago
  What's the difference between being fired and laid off?
warcher 10y ago
Ah yes, the "startup you work at". Well, I'm probably full for the moment, but a startup that I know is bleeding some in my neck of the woods is MasteryConnect. Chop chop chop. Domo is not looking good, but they probably have money to survive for a bit.
- josep2 10y ago
  I interviewed at MasteryConnect 2 years ago and their business model seemed doomed.
  - warcher 10y ago
    Yeah, I don't really get it either. Know a couple people laid off from there. They'd hired a bunch of kids from a coding bootcamp, and there was a serious bloodbath amongst them. An interesting case study-- seems like it shook out that there were definitely bootcamp grads that could hack it, but without the four year college filter they needed to do a big cull. Some of the campers are in and will stay in, most will wash out in a downturn. Same as it ever was, I suppose.
questionr 10y ago
There's the official WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification) report... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraining_Notification_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini... http://www.edd.ca.gov/jobs_and_training/Layoff_Services_WARN.htm http://www.edd.ca.gov/jobs_and_training/Layoff_Services_WARN... http://www.edd.ca.gov/jobs_and_training/warn/WARN-Report-for-7-1-2015-to-06-30-2016.pdf http://www.edd.ca.gov/jobs_and_training/warn/WARN-Report-for...
jennisNo 10y ago
Acorns is not firing people, but has already lost ~15 top performers due to poor executive leadership
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  Damn, they were making waves here due to screenscraping Commbank and then writing a letter to the Prime Minister about it.
  - brongondwana 10y ago
    That didn't used to be particularly hard - I didn't even have to use any fancy libraries when I last cared enough for real-time feeds of my data to do it. Now I just pay Xero to get real-time feeds for me.
- anon2020 10y ago
  The same is happening to Funding Circle in the UK. The company is still profitable, but a lot of devs are leaving because of certain decisions.
  - dig1 10y ago
    Funny, four days ago I've read they are looking for backend devs...
  - iLemming 10y ago
    Do you mean decision of becoming Clojure-centric? That was probably the best thing that could happen. Can't say about UK but in the US office we are interviewing for engineering positions almost every day.
- percthrowaway 10y ago
  Same at Percolate.
anon12369 10y ago
Shopstyle in SF just laid off 20 staffers between dev and product.
- theow 10y ago
  I heard that was directly due to development team deciding to rewrite their site in "the angular" because it was quote: "like Haskell but better" Blew a huge hole in their search engine rankings.
  - celticninja 10y ago
    How did rewriting the site in another language affect their ranking?
    - thomas88 10y ago
      Angular is a javascript framework rendered on the client and javascript is not yet 100% supported by the crawlers at search engines (but it's getting better).
  - js_what_ 10y ago
    Well, it does have really poor load times and isn't SEO friendly in the least. Where I work, we are going through the same pain but with a different -- more in style -- set of front end practices. It's a real shame what poor management, idealism, over-engineering and developers desperately putting their own goals ahead of the company will do to a product.
throw1988_9121 10y ago
The company where I work has been going through problems and for the past few months people keep being let go. After 4 months of watching an average of 2 people loose their jobs per month, I had the idea to register dayssincelastlayoff.com. My idea was to have a 'X Days Since Last Injury' kind of image on the site that would just show this stat for various companies. My thinking was that knowing how frequently a company was letting go of it's employees might be a good metric to figure out if the management knows what they are doing. And my experience (written below) leads me to believe that a company laying off a small number of employees but doing it frequently is worse than a company that just does one huge round of layoffs. This is the first time I've been part of a company that's going through a round of layoffs, and I understand that there are business decisions that lead to this. But the way I've seen it happen here is that instead of one massive round of layoffs (which they had as well. Fired around 8 people at the same time when the down sizing started) the management here kept firing 1 or 2 people at a time every month. From a morale perspective, this felt worse than loosing a bunch of people at once. Because this way, everybody keeps thinking if they are next. Has anyone else seen this happen, and did the company survive after this? Because what's happening at my work is that now, everybody has started looking for new jobs, because of the uncertainty. The layoffs have stopped since the last month, so I lost interest in the idea. But just to throw it out there, could something like this ever be useful? If yes I might do something useful with the domain.
- hinkley 10y ago
  Pretty much my experience. Once one useful person gets laid off, everyone can't help but think they're the next useful person to get laid off. And in small groups it feels personal. So now you're playing CYA instead of taking the good kinds of risks with big payoffs.
  - throw1988_9121 10y ago
    In your opinion what hurts morale more? One big round of layoff, or multiple smaller rounds? I've only seen the later happen, and personally I think I'd prefer the first one. If you know that after that large layoff round the rest of the company is safe, I'd venture that might be better for the morale of the remaining employees.
keyle 10y ago
This is less useful than the hiring one but more entertaining and gives us a chance to boost morale of the people actually hurt. Good thread imho.
- shashwat986 10y ago
  It can be useful if companies are doing it in a backhanded manner, and trying to hide the state of affairs from its own employees. Kinda why fuckedcompany became so popular
mkteer 10y ago
My friend's company Iron.io laid off ~20 employees in SF (almost the entire company). Apparently their series A round brought in 12 million just a year ago.
- giis 10y ago
  Any specific reason you got from your friend? I checked their webpage it has few job openings!
- threeseed 10y ago
  It's a shame because Iron.io has truly fantastic offerings. Better than anything from any of the major cloud providers. The only problem is that it's hard to beat having your entire platform in the one place. Especially for billing, security etc.
  - patstar 10y ago
    We had some pretty bad issues with them earlier this year. Queues would randomly change from push to pull, service outages, etc. Seems to have stabilized for the most part, but we aren't using them much now.
- carimura 10y ago
  Hi All, This is Chad, CEO of Iron.io. It's true that we had to make some hard decisions and say goodbye to some friends. That said, a majority of the team is still here and dedicated to operating and growing the company. IronWorker fires up millions of containers per day for our 300+ customers, and we are fully committed to both expanding the service as well as releasing a new, open source sync service, next week... stay tuned. Feel free to reach out to me to discuss any of this, or if you simply want to talk serverless computing. email: chad [at] iron.io twitter: @chadarimura Chad
cyberferret 10y ago
When I read this, all I could picture was the scene in HBO's 'Silicon Valley' where Gavin Belson sacks his entire Nucleus team, then later inadvertently hires them all back again when he acquires EndFrame, and doesn't realise that he is talking to the same people in the same room about the same product.
- jnsaff2 10y ago
  argh, spoilers :(
  - majortennis 10y ago
    it's not that kind of show
  - cyberferret 10y ago
    Oh, drat - I'm sorry. I had assumed most HN readers would have seen the series already - it was on a while back, wasn't it? (We only just saw it in Australia, which is usually an indication that is has been on in the US about a year ago?!?)
    - lxmorj 10y ago
      You did start with "the scene in HBO's 'Silicon Valley' where" Not the BEST warning but not nothing...
    - intruder 10y ago
      You could edit it.
      - cyberferret 10y ago
        Must be out of time to edit :( don't see the option any longer (perhaps I don't have enough karma?)
        pbadenski 10y ago
diamondo25 10y ago
The company I worked (Treatwell) for has lost a lot of good developers since the acquirement from the london based company Wahanda. 2 months ago they basically fired eveyone tech related in the Amsterdam office. Its a shame, I guess thats normal when you acquire a company for $38M[0] and figuring out everything is double. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/05/european-salon-booking-site-wahanda-buys-dutch-rival-treatwell-for-38m/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/05/european-salon-booking-sit...
1474295912 10y ago
VisualMeta GmbH in Berlin. They're a 'start-up' backed by Axel Springer, Berlin. They fired about 60-70 people recently, some of them on their first day of work. Most of their devs come from non-existent countries (China/Eritrea/Pakistan etc) and they're paid abysmally (€32-34k). It's a surprise that this news wasn't covered at all in Berlin start-up press.
- Raed667 10y ago
  34k € is a bad salary in Germany? Because I think it is an average 1st salary in France (or the companies I've been talking to are also planning to get me paid abysmally)
  - 1474295912 10y ago
    34k ain't bad, but average salaries for Experienced Java devs with 5+ years of experience are in the range of 50-55k. Also by paying less than blue card limit, the devs are basically tied to VisualMeta. Most of the devs don't know German system well and thus are being taken advantage of.
    - b4xt3em4n 10y ago
      34k will be very good salary for an experienced java dev in Italy..
  - slau 10y ago
    Depends on where you live. If you're near a larger city or not. There's a huge discrepancy in salaries Due to geography (and also massively depends on your skill set, obviously). To give you a frame of reference, I was pretty well paid in Perpignan after a few years in a company (a bit north of 40k€). The junior devs I hired got south of 24k€.
  - kriro 10y ago
    For a developer I'd say yes. For comparison the yearly salary for an entry level academic (masters->university) is about 44k € gross/year (which more or less automatically goes up to about 49k after one year). I'd expect a decent entry level developer to make at least that.
sdoering 10y ago
Here in Germany. Jimdo (something like SquareSpace) is laying of (I believe) up to 25% of it's staff.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- phoet 10y ago
  that is correct, they even created a website (with a competitor) for some of the people that were let go: http://j-quit.weebly.com/ http://j-quit.weebly.com/
  - sdoering 10y ago
    Thanks for the link. We made an effort to communicate that we are hiring into the ranks of people jimdo let go (or people who want to leave)[1]. [1]: https://www.facebook.com/SinnerSchrader/photos/a.494291552139.272849.358531227139/10154694003457140/?type=3&theater https://www.facebook.com/SinnerSchrader/photos/a.49429155213...
carsongross 10y ago
We need to resurrect fuckedcompany.com. Maybe throw it on 4chan? http://boards.4chan.org/fuckedcompany/ http://boards.4chan.org/fuckedcompany/
- jmcgough 10y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckedcompany/ https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckedcompany/
nyccentralpark2 10y ago
Marvell Semiconductors will be shutting down quite a few businesses. Quite a lot of top level management replaced already
scarythoughts 10y ago
My friend and his entire data engineering department were laid off from Imgur.com in August. About 10 people of 70 out so.
- dkns 10y ago
  I wonder if this has anything to do with reddit implementing their own image hosting service.
  - d23 10y ago
    That came around before August.
    - wyldfire 10y ago
      But it might take some months before that change to reddit reverberates into imgur visitor metrics and on into advertising revenue.
      - d23 10y ago
        Ah whoops, I thought something else was being implied.
  - jbob2000 10y ago
    That, and they took an investment from Andreessen-Horowitz and their 2 years is up! I don't think they were able to make a go of it and the writing is on the wall.
singingfish 10y ago
my ex employer got rid of me in order to spend more $ on aws burning cpu cycles instead. Would like to hire juniors in spades though mind you.
- 0xmohit 10y ago
  in order to spend more $ on aws burning cpu cycles instead Maybe he was long on AMZN and desperately wanted the stock to move up.
  - falsedan 10y ago
    Who isn't?
johnnyfaehell 10y ago
From the sounds of it Kisura GmbH in Berlin is currently tanking. They're making payroll late, not paying suppliers, etc. They don't need to fire anyone because everyone is quitting.
- expertentipp 10y ago
  Looking at their footer - backed by the EU funds for regional development... I have yet so see a successful web project backed by the EU funds. They seem to care about PDF and Word reports more than about any of the software the company creates.
nailer 10y ago
YPlan just fired a bunch of people and 'sold' to TimeOut for TimeOut group stock. I'd expect more to go.
known 10y ago
Heads I Win; Tails You Lose;
lawnchair 10y ago
This is great. Please do this every month. Very useful.
germanthrowaway 10y ago
There is a big german gamecompany that hasn't paid 300+ employees in 4 months so they are bleeding employees instead of firing them.
- oevi 10y ago
  Gameforge?
  - germanthrowaway 10y ago
    no
  - Sujan 10y ago
    GF already fired ~100 people a few days ago: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-10-25-layoffs-strike-gameforge-as-publisher-abandons-mobile http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-10-25-layoffs-str...
- Sujan 10y ago
  Hamburg, I guess... ?
  - germanthrowaway 10y ago
    no
  - Yaziyumaru 10y ago
    Could be, I know alot of developers here who work for GoodGames and InnoGames. I think GG did a batch of firings semi-recently but I don't recall hearing about anybody not being paid. Then again I'm not German so I miss out on some news.
    - germanthrowaway 10y ago
      not gg, not ig
- tomaskafka 10y ago
serenova001 10y ago
Serenova (prev known as LiveOps Cloud) closes their Bay Area and Auckland (New Zealand) offices later this month after running them down for the last year. Positions moved to Austin, Fredrickton (Canada) and outsourced. By coincidence the CTO lives in Fredrickton and the CEO lives in Austin.
Melbalot 10y ago
So I heard through the grapevine about a company in Melbourne Aus making a 'virtual personal assistant'. CEO is an ex fortune 500 bigshot that jetsets across the world with their daughter (also senior management at the company) burning cash like there's no tomorrow, while giving the illusion that business deals are 'just about to come through'. The smart ones have been leaving consistently through the company's history, and recently they had a layoff of around half their staff. From the sounds of it, almost sounds like a shell company - half baked product that no-one uses, and they've managed to convince investors out of millions in cash. To me seems just like the dotcom crash all over again - crazy that investors aren't on top of this shit, where's the due diligence / sense checking at?
- flukus 10y ago
  I think I applied to them about 6 months ago. I was rejected for "not doing TDD" because I checked in my tests and code at the same time.
kesor 10y ago
Plenty of HPE employees are going home unemployed these days. https://www.thelayoff.com/hp-enterprise https://www.thelayoff.com/hp-enterprise
shivaodin 10y ago
Appdynamics is laying off people, sometimes by the dozen.
partiallogic 10y ago
9 months into my first developer gig and the company is taking a change of direction which involves making half the office redundant. I've opted for VR as it feels like staying would just be delaying the inevitable.
soulnothing 10y ago
At one of the bigger cable companies. My contract was recently terminated, I was told end of September it would end by December 30th. Luckily I knew this was coming, as my project wasn't feasible. Oddily enough this is my second contract with the company. Same thing happened the first time around. On to greener pastures I hope.
- virtuallynathan 10y ago
  Comcast? or Charter/TWC?
- SamUK96 10y ago
  Isn't constructive dismissal supposed to protect you from being put on a failing project/team just so they can fire you?
  - tptacek 10y ago
    Unless you're a very senior executive or in a union, it's pretty rare to have a constructive dismissal clause in your employee contract. For most companies, 85% of the point of having that contract is to reaffirm at-will employment.
  - soulnothing 10y ago
    I worked as a W2 contractor, and in turn expect no rights. I also learned my lesson the first pass. I asked for something more challenging, because I had nothing on my agile board for 3 months. I in turn was given notice. It's a dance I've unfortunately gotten used too. Join the project sounds fun. Project was not scoped, it's pared back. Then my contract is rescinded. While I talked to my contracting firm, they gave me other roles. They were tech support, customer service, etc. variety.
andy 10y ago
I was fired from Wickr.com a few months after their layoffs. I was fired from Wickr a few months ago. The given reason was they considered me not a Senior Android Developer and that was my title - I asked too many questions apparently. My manager indicated that if my title had been Android Developer there probably would not have been a problem. I don't care about titles really. I was hired in 2014 as a contractor for 3 months, and then they converted me to a salaried employee. I'm currently searching for a job. I'm finding it challenging to find my next job I think due to disclosing that I was fired from Wickr after a performance review and me being there 2 years doesn't help. The interesting thing is the performance review was held in December 2015, a few months after some layoffs where I was not affected but coworkers were. Another interesting thing is Wickr HR person told us that during the performance review to not expect any surprises. However, this underperformance was a complete surprise to me. I had never been notified. Personally, I would prefer to be laid off vs fired, even if it means a few months less of salary. It was very easy for me to obtain the job at Wickr. I wasn't asked hardly any technical questions and just did a phone screen, never met in person. One thing is I liked being a contractor at Wickr because I was paid for hours worked. The CTO was very insistent about us working overtime, meaning nights and weekends. I complained to him about this overtime requirement without getting paid in an email about a month before my performance review. The reason I emailed was because we were just in a scrum meeting where management was asking us for feedback on how the sprint went.
- istorical 10y ago
  Nobody in this world is gonna fight for you other than yourself. Don't bring up the termination without being asked if you were fired (in which case it may be better to just admit it), when you're talking about work experience just say after working there for some time you then decided to pursue other opportunities. Maybe 3 out 4 companies will still figure it out, but all you need is that one success.
- JamesBarney 10y ago
  First question is are you sure you were fired with cause and not laid off? If you're sure it's the first you might want to consult a lawyer. Usually a company needs a pretty strong paper trail and a lot of evidence of you screwing up royally before they can fire with cause.
debunn 10y ago
The Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan (OTPP) in Toronto, Ontario, Canada is currently laying off over 100+ (union, management and contractor) IT folks from the Enterprise Technology Solutions (IT operations) and Testing teams. All of the affected positions are being transferred to Tata Consultancy Services (TCS - India based offshoring service company), with those who are affected being mandated to knowledge transfer with TCS up to the January 31, 2017 termination date. While there have been internal assurances that no other teams are going to be outsourced in the near future, I wouldn't recommend applying for any IT based roles at OTPP. Full disclosure - I currently work for, and am affected by this outsourcing. (edit - adding article for those interested in details) http://www.benefitscanada.com/news/ontario-teachers-to-outsource-108-it-positions-86124 http://www.benefitscanada.com/news/ontario-teachers-to-outso...
- eswat 10y ago
  This reminds me of the RBC debacle a few years ago, where they abused the Temporary Foreign Worker Program to replace capable, salaried Canadian IT workers with offshore services. That stint hurt not just those workers but other companies that were trying to hire the best in the world, only for the feds to deny visas due to one bad apple spoiling the bunch. http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/news/rbc-temporary-foreign-workers/ http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/news/rbc-temporary-foreign-work...
  - debunn 10y ago
    Yes - we've discussed amongst ourselves (those affected) about what RBC did, and how they were lambasted in the media for abusing the visas. In our particular case, TCS seems to already have a number of local assets they're involving, with most of the work to be sourced by India based teams. I'm sure OTPP is trying to avoid similar negative press in regards to abusing visas, but I've been surprised how little coverage this news is getting in general (a pension plan funded by local Ontario union based teachers firing local union based employees for offshore assets.)
    - eswat 10y ago
      Might be worth notifying personalities like Michael Geist about this and act as a voice.
brettbivens 10y ago
Great thread idea. To echo the thoughts of others in this thread, it is nice to see conversation and transparency around this difficult topic. Personally have been on both sides of the layoff table and have seen it handled different ways. In some cases, have seen transparency throughout the company failure process with founders and investors working tirelessly to help people land on their feet. In others, have seen deception, founders locking themselves in their office or staying away entirely. Then, little more than a "Dear John" letter telling people it is over. As you can expect, the general outcomes - from perception of the founders and investors to future collaboration and working relationships between laid off employees - have been significantly better in the former scenario. Quick plug - I'm on the team at a VC firm out of Chicago and am always looking at new ways to help companies we work with find and retain great people. Have been looking into ways we can work with founders of sputtering companies (both in our portfolio and outside) and the employees that are impacted by the failure of those companies. Overall goal being to... 1. help hiring companies find great, available people 2. help laid off employees get back on their feet and find great roles 3. help CEOs of failed companies do right by the folks who If you are a CEO that is contemplating layoffs or have had to do them in the past... or if you're someone that has been laid off, I'd love to connect - brett.bivens [at] gmail.com. Or, feel free to just reply here!
eladrin201 10y ago
I was let go two weeks ago from a small downtown, Austin dev shop. I was let go because they couldn't afford to keep me on anymore. I could see the decline in the company as it was happening so it wasn't a huge surprise. Still sucks. Now I'm scrambling to get my tech stack up to date and find new work.
stevetursi 10y ago
Hertz laid off nearly the entirety of their rank and file IT staff earlier this year. https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/02/13/1630244/hertz-is-pulling-a-disney https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/02/13/1630244/hertz-is-pu... In order to receive our severance, we were forced to train our IBM replacements, who were in India. Hertz's strategy of IBM and Austerity is the new SMT's solution for a balance sheet that's in shambles, yet they have rewarded themselves by increasing executive compensation 35% over the prior year, including a $6 million bonus to the CIO. http://insiders.morningstar.com/trading/executive-compensation.action?t=HTZ http://insiders.morningstar.com/trading/executive-compensati... I personally landed in an Alphabet company, received a giant raise, and now I get to work on really amazing stuff, so I'm doing fine. But to this day I'm sad to think how our once-amazing Hertz team, staffed with really smart people, led by the best boss I ever had, and were really driving the innovation at Hertz, was just thrown away like yesterday's garbage.
- epynonymous 10y ago
  really sorry about your past experience with hertz, but it sounds like you ended up with a better deal. your post piqued my interest because i've been a long time business user of hertz (not by choice i can assure you), and i can't say that i'm at all impressed with any of their services. probably not your team's doing, but about a year ago, i got off a 12 hour flight in sfo to stand in line at hertz only to be ushered to a kiosk where i had to do a video conference with some remote teller. this was the biggest garbage service in the world, i cannot believe they actually spent money on this solution, i ended up getting ushered back to a teller at the desk where i was already standing in line. perhaps you were in the twilight zone at hertz doing wonderful things, but i think that company is rotten and should rot in hell.
- rybosome 10y ago
  The failing business and laid off workers combined with executive compensation increases/bonuses is very much an example of why Sanders and Trump are so popular, and why candidates like them (or more extreme) will come out of the woodwork in 4 years.
  - 10y ago
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
lardissone 10y ago
Gravity4 laid off a large number of remote contract employees back in March, and also paid less than the total of the owed money. No reasons provided. Anyway you shouldn't expect much of the company of that guy with that criminal record.
jason_wang 10y ago
Before posting, double check your severance agreement. It's common to have a non-disparagement (no bad mouthing) clause in it.
- loeg 10y ago
  Can true statements be disparagement?
  - noescape 10y ago
    This is a really good question. It seems a non-disparagement clause waives one's right to the first amendment. http://www.jaburgwilk.com/news-publications/what-is-a-non-disparagement-clause-and-why-you-may-not-want-to-sign-one http://www.jaburgwilk.com/news-publications/what-is-a-non-di... Is this right?
    - JBlue42 10y ago
      Whenever I had to sign one after a lay-off I checked with lawyer friends first. They are not really enforceable.
      - noescape 10y ago
        Can you explain what you mean by "really enforceable"? Does it mean that they often don't get enforced, but are legally binding -- or does it mean they're illegal? If they're legally binding then that's still bad.
    - wayn3 10y ago
      you can not waive your first amendment rights. inalienable rights can't be alienated by yourself either.
- johnnyfaehell 10y ago
  Absolute truth is a defence to non-disparagement.
cema 10y ago
Parametric Technology (http://www.ptc.com/ http://www.ptc.com/) has had a series of layoffs. They are trying to turn the business around, clumsily it seems. Never having been associated with the company myself, I will let others talk. Well known in Boston area.
Blackthorn 10y ago
Why don't you start? No name in your post.
throwawaythrow1 10y ago
I'm really surprised this hasn't hit the UK news, but the government department that regulates welfare (the DWP) just discovered a £350 Million deficit that is proactively not being acknowledged by the leadership team. Despite maybe 1000+ people losing their job. Granted, a lot of these job losses probably affect contractors and suppliers (IBM, Accenture, CapGemini) more than anyone. But the general perception is that the department is a sinking ship trying to shed weight as fast and as ruthlessly as possible. Many of these people were given only an hour or two notice. They will no doubt get more money in April but many projects (100s) have been "paused" and I really doubt that the Subject Matter Experts will have the appetite to return to a department that screwed up their budget to such a huge degree.
Anonimaus 10y ago
Mattermark has had so much turnover that they took the team page down. https://web.archive.org/web/20160903075336/https://mattermark.com/team/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160903075336/https://mattermar...
7f60009e 10y ago
Lugg is firing people.

anon400232 10y ago

You could share thoughts on Glassdoor, right? I would like to find (or create) a service where we can talk about the real dirt at companies. Encouraging honest accounts without disparagment is a hard balance. Building an identity and reputation system where reviews are trustworthy is hard, especially if you also want anonymity. Like many people, I've worked at places with big problems. In cases where friends apply, I strive to give an honest account of my experience. Different people can tolerate different levels and kinds of crazy. In most cases, I still know people at such companies. I want to offer constructive criticism in a public setting, because I think this could help companies and people can change for the better. I want them to find a way to succeed.

a3n 10y ago
> I would like to find (or create) a service where we can talk about the real dirt at companies. I'd be waiting for the wikileaks dumps of that service, followed by firings. Data wants to be naked and exposed.
- pennaMan 10y ago
  Why would such a service hold leak worthy data?
  - a3n 10y ago
    Actually wikileaks was an unthought player. More likely (if at all) someone who sells data or just likes to watch things burn. It was a bit knee jerk on my part, as I've become much more reluctant to spread my data footprint. If the data isn't there, it can't be stolen.
phamilton 10y ago
Blind was pretty awesome when I was at Yahoo during layoffs. It's died down a bit since though.
flukus 10y ago
> because I think this could help companies and people can change for the better. The first lesson you'd learn is that these companies would rather shoot the messenger, which would be you in this case.
achievingApathy 10y ago
RIP FuckedCompany.com.
intoverflow2 10y ago
>I would like to find (or create) a service where we can talk about the real dirt at companies It exists, it's posting anonymous timestamped proof on 4chan's /g/ then saying whatever you want to get off your chest.
cmdrfred 10y ago
I'm working on an encrypted chat system in JS, I'd lend my code and skills to such an effort.

desdiv 10y ago

I did a double-take when I saw Twitter posting[0] in the Who's Hiring thread. What's the rationale here? Why are they firing and hiring at the same time? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12851502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12851502

krrishd 10y ago
I might be wrong but it makes sense to spend more hiring dollars where they'll increase the bottom line (which is why they're still hiring) while reducing spending in places that are negatively contributing?
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  Yet, you can just get your current employees on a room, and tell them to stop doing those actions that won't increase the bottom line, and start doing those ones that do. Obviously, people have different talents, and can't do equally well any task you ask them. But I really doubt Twitter even tried. No company tries. More likely they froze their employees tasks beforehand so they could be better evaluated.
flukus 10y ago
> Why are they firing and hiring at the same time? Because downsizing via attrition is a death sentence. The worst people are the most likely to stay and then new hires will be unlikely to stick around and deal with the code from the worst people. Once the spiral starts it's hard to get out of.
- _Codemonkeyism 10y ago
  I always found if funny companies touting "We're hiring only the best" and then "We firing the worst".
  - jknoepfler 10y ago
    Companies can self-consistently seek to hire the best and fire the worst from the the hired-pool. 1. Hiring is a noisy process. You can tune your hiring test to lean more towards false negatives or more towards false positives, but you cannot (at this juncture in history) eliminate a large amount of bias (error) from evaluations of candidates. 2. Regression to the mean ensures that any hiring process that sets a "high bar" will result in pool of developers who are on average below that bar. 3. as an employee remains at a company, the bias in your evaluation process should decrease dramatically. One can, and probably should try to weed out false positives, especially if one is trying to reduce payroll. Companies can self-consistently seek to hire the best and fire the worst from the the hired-pool.
    - intoverflow2 10y ago
      Knew the HN SV crowd would find a way to spin this as "This is good for <company>"
      - kefka 10y ago
        Its not a spin. Its the actual business process and thought behind it. The solution to that is challenge it with clout equal to the business. And that means unions. Only when 2 powers butt heads, will there be any fairness out of that.
        jknoepfler 10y ago
        > Its the actual business process and thought behind it. Exactly. Even if one disagrees with a thought process (actually, especially if one disagrees with a thought process), one should still seek to understand it inasmuch as possible. Otherwise one is doomed to repeat it.
      - jknoepfler 10y ago
        For the record, I am neither employed in or near Silicon Valley (not that it should matter), nor do I have any strong beliefs about whether or not actively weeding out developers is a good tactic for a business (five years ago I would have said it wasn't, now I'm agnostic). Whatever my beliefs or situation though, it's not hard for anyone to understand how a medium-to-large scale organization with a high hiring bar could make a rational decision to "hire the best" while still making an effort to release the least valuable developers in the company. An alternative strategy is Google's. Google tunes their hiring process to produce almost exclusively false negatives rather than false positives (they very deliberately reject qualified candidates far more often than they hire under-qualified candidates). With this hiring strategy in place, it wouldn't make as much sense for Google to "weed out" developers. And for the record I think 20th-century impersonal, statistical business thinking is toxic, but that doesn't mean I don't see its use or that I know of a better way to do things.
        abraae 10y ago
  - mc32 10y ago
    It is really funny in a way and necessary in another. Funny because companies necessarily say they aspire to have a representative workforce, one which reflects the community (local/national workforce, users, the founders?) but then when it comes down to it, they only want to keep the ones who will provide some value (which is obvious) but then remember the community is made up of all kinds of people with different abilities --so we realize we are all in it for ourselves --there is no "community" where we look after each other. It's me or them, really. It's necessary because, well, we live in a competitive world where your competitor isn't going to say, well, let's take it easy on them, they are keeping on a bunch of underachievers, and keeping underachivers employed is good for community, so we should give them a break.
  - dmichulke 10y ago
    'Best' here refers to the population of job seekers, 'worst' refers to the population of the employees. There are still some elements in the 'best of all job seekers' (= employees) who qualify as worse than the rest. You don't even need to change the trait(s) 'best' and 'worst' refer to.
dredmorbius 10y ago
"Pivot"
chipperyman573 10y ago
I doubt people being fired from Vine are prevented from applying to Twitter, this just gives them an eas/y/ier way to vet the good ones.
kokon 10y ago
Because having a mass layoff is an easy way to reduce non productive people. Otherwise you have to go through a complicated process for each individual, with a higher risk to be sued.
- Kurtz79 10y ago
  That's maybe the theory, maybe. In practice, in my personal experience, mass layoffs are a nightmare for everybody, and end up affecting also those not directly involved (especially since in most cases they don't know if they are until the layoffs are done). So: - Many of the "productive" people will leave on their own accord for better pastures, even before the layoffs are carried out. - The rest will find themselves with an increased workload (and the nagging feeling they should have followed the lead of the previous group).
- walshemj 10y ago
  How come in a right to work regimen like the states how is it hard? you can just say "we have decided to cut back marketing head count by 20%"
  - CapitalistCartr 10y ago
    Exactly. That's a layoff, not firing.
    - analog31 10y ago
      There are some nuances to the terminology. Companies avoid the term "layoff" because it implies that people might be re-hired once the slowdown is over. Growing up near Detroit, I remember layoffs where the status of the laid off workers was specified in the union contract. I have not heard of this kind of layoff in recent times, outside of unionized companies. Laypeople like me usually reserve "firing" for people who are fired "with cause." When companies fire people "at will," they often use words like "reduction in force." Perhaps a better way of thinking about it is the consequences of being fired. If you are fired "at will," then you are entitled to things like unemployment compensation, COBRA benefits, etc. If you are fired "with cause," then you lose those benefits. If an employee is a klunker, they will often wait for business to slow down, fire them "at will," and pay the benefits, to avoid potentially getting sued for false termination.
orange_county 10y ago
I believe the hiring is a facade. They have been sending out hackerrank tests to every new grad but never planning to follow up. As a matter of fact, they stated that they will "follow up" in December. Any serious company in the Bay Area wouldn't be this slow with hiring if they were not in trouble.
- rconti 10y ago
  I don't disagree with your conclusion about Twitter specifically, but it always blows my mind how slow tech companies are to deal with candidates in a hot job market.
  - huac 10y ago
    It's just Twitter. The new grad hiring at pretty much everywhere else is full throttle (or more accurately, pretty much done now).
tzs 10y ago
According to the link given by Keverw most of the fired employees were in marketing and sales. The "Who's Hiring" post is asking for software engineers to work on server infrastructure.
- user5994461 10y ago
  That's a tough position to recruit for currently. Let's all be positive and suppose that they always had real vacancies in there :D
ewjordan 10y ago
Firing gets rid of the worst. Hiring, at least in theory, pulls in the best. Healthy companies at scale and size equilibrium should be doing both at roughly the same rate, averaged over time.
- rootlocus 10y ago
  > Hiring, at least in theory, pulls in the best. If you're firing "the worst", that means at some point, you hired them. Not to mention "the best" is a very vague term. How do you quantify quality? What pool of people are you selecting "the best" from? How many of them are "the best"? The first two? The first ten?
  - pvaldes 10y ago
    > If you're firing "the worst", that means at some point, you hired them ... or that working in your company causes a serious damage and suck out all the talent of the people before to let it go totally burnt.
- hga 10y ago
  Firing gets rid of the worst at playing the internal political game. Fixed it for you. Something I've seen at at least a couple of companies where it resulted in killing the company, and one of those was the storied Lucent (forced to sell out to Alcatel, which itself didn't fare well, evidently most of it was sold to Nokia in January this year). The managers even made a point of telling us how their firing a particular key guy showed no one was safe. Well, the same was true of the project, which was de jure and de facto necessary for Lucent's continued existence as an independent entity, it was a media gateway, which along with a media gateway controller such as their very well received Softswitch replaces a unitary switch like their 5ESS. (It was a very interesting project, BTW, we were working with 5ESS types in Cincinnati, and like that storied system it was a true 5 9's system, no faking it for scheduled maintenance, people expect their telecom systems to be available 24x7 absent acts of God.)

ryandrake 10y ago

One of my favorite sites back in the day! I remember checking it daily to make sure my employer wasn't there. Fun times! We seem to be missing that edge--that deep cynicism and unashamed negativity--this time around.

jdale27 10y ago
Well, as they say: "This time it's different!"
- danieltillett 10y ago
  This time is different. Back in the dot com days the companies were public and so the day of reckoning came quickly. Today everyone is running on VC/PE/SWF money and so problems can be hidden for a long time. Having said this until US interest rates rise or unless a white swan event occurs (I am Australian so all swans are black here) the music will keep playing and the everyone will keep dancing.
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    No doubt part of it is how these companies are funded. There's so much private money, and nobody knows what to do with it so it gets tossed at these hobby projects, and by some miracle one of them turns into a unicorn. But there are other differences now too. You can't simply ridicule anything anymore. Back in 2000 we could point to a company trying to sell designer kitty litter on the Internet and laugh at how stupid it was and how greedy and full of hubris the founders were. Now, everyone's trying to "change the world" and empower everyone and "enable the sharing economy" and, well you can't criticize that without sounding like a big meanie. There are a lot of web sites out there that are simply never going to be businesses. They have their runway to burn through, and once it's done, they'll be blogging about Their Amazing Journey as they get acqui-hired. But when you point this out, you're just being negative--you're a jealous wantrepreneur. Maybe this is an old-timer's "get off my lawn" rant, but I preferred it when it was OK to poke fun at things that you knew were ridiculous.
    - flukus 10y ago
      > Maybe this is an old-timer's "get off my lawn" rant, but I preferred it when it was OK to poke fun at things that you knew were ridiculous. It came off as an old timers rant, but I still enjoyed it :) Maybe we strayed a bit too far from the "greed is good" 80's. There's nothing wrong with starting a business to make money. It's more pervasive than just dotcoms though. I see the same things we stuff like solar roadways or hyper loop is criticized.
      - soVeryTired 10y ago
        Too many people mistake skepticism for cynicism.
- more_corn 10y ago
  Isn't the quote "This time... will be different!!!" And then when the corn kills him again and: "That's not different at all now, is it Steve?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TMOMTtAMBI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TMOMTtAMBI We are all Steve and this time will not be different.
  - jdale27 10y ago
    Uh, I wasn't familiar with that little tidbit of culture... Rather, it was a reference to the fact that in the last few years, any time someone suggests that we might be in another tech bubble, there's always someone waiting to point out how "this time it's different", because now the web is mature and all the stupid startups are not really as stupid as they seem (not like in the first dot-com bubble). Actually, it's a bit of a double entendre in that sense -- even the first dot-com bubble was rife with statements about how everything is different now, and we're in a "new economy" and all those "old economy" concepts like revenue and profit are totally obsolete. Plus ça change...

Dobbs 10y ago
Being fired generally means you did something wrong wrong. Laid off means the company is getting rid of people to reduce costs or due to removing the position, for example due to change of strategy. One generally implies personal fault, the other implies side-effect of business.
rezashirazian 10y ago
You are laid off when the company is downsizing, has no need for your services or cannot pay your wages. You get fired when you fail to perform adequately at your job.
joatmon-snoo 10y ago
Technically none, but "fired" tends to refer specifically to when there was some specific employee conduct, e.g. failure to fulfill responsibilities, which forced the company to let the employee go. "Laid off" is a broader term that doesn't carry the same negative connotation and is more appropriate when, say, a company is strapped for cash and lets go of someone to free up money in the budget.
tehwalrus 10y ago
In the UK, "getting fired" or "getting the sack" means you were incompetent (or commited misconduct) and are sent home. For incompentance, they can only do this after a "performance review" (they have to give you 3 months to improve, I think). "Laid off" is called being "made redundant". The company can do this much more easily to a bunch of people, but it generally has to pay them ~6 months salary and can't hire new people at the same time, for the same job(s). Any employer being more aggressive than this will probably be taken to an employment tribunal. In the States, I've heard you guys use the terms synonymously, but it always sounded a little weird. Your employment law is awful for employees though, by comparison.
- kelnos 10y ago
  No, we use the terms the same way in the US, just the protections behind them are weaker (and personally, as an employee, I'm fine with it that way). You might be thinking of the phrase "was let go", which is just a nicer way of saying "got fired". "Laid off" here means the same as in the UK: you were sent home because your job function isn't needed anymore, or because the company is downsizing.
  - vertex-four 10y ago
    > and personally, as an employee, I'm fine with it that way You mean as a reasonably well-off employee who was lucky enough to have picked a growing field when you went to uni. On the other hand, if that field ever stops growing for any reason... you might see why people enjoy stability and the ability to plan ahead in their work life.
    - philh 10y ago
      Some people think that pro-employee laws are not in fact good for employees. Regardless of whether or not you agree with them, it's super uncharitable to dismiss them in this way.
      - vertex-four 10y ago
        Pro-employee laws are not good for employees in the success case - that you're a top 10% worker in a field that is growing and has lots of demand. The thing is, if you think about the failure case - you're a disposable cog in a field that's stagnating - there's issues which need to be solved, unless you're a staunch libertarian with a belief that people who are unable to find work should die. Nobody wants to pay for a 40yo person with a family to spend years retraining when they lose their job and can't find another, so what is there to do?
        tbrownaw 10y ago
        The alternative to making it impossible to fire people, is to make getting fired less of a big deal. Instead of adding friction to the employment market, implement a decent social safety net that includes provisions for voc ed / retraining. Instead of focusing solely on prevention, work on mitigation. To much prevention can make everything grind to a halt.
        vertex-four 10y ago
        > Instead of adding friction to the employment market, implement a decent social safety net that includes provisions for voc ed / retraining. Sure, except that nobody wants to do that for some abstract reason of "fairness", so the problem needs to be mitigated another way.
- dfraser992 10y ago
  You forgot about being 'sent to Coventry' - i.e. the company doesn't want to pay you redundancy, and can't fire you for incompetence, so you get ignored, not given any work, get put in a useless role, etc until you wise up and quit/find another job. British passive aggressiveness at its finest! Being American. I would have had no problem with being fired aka 'you're now surplus' and it would have been far more helpful (i.e. get it over with) vs. letting me twist in the wind for a few months... or even have a hard talk with me to see if I might be useful elsewhere in the company because I was bored etc. But the procedure they used to downsize the workforce earlier that year before that was cruel - straight out of the Victorian era...
  - willthames 10y ago
    Sent to Coventry appears to be Constructive Dismissal under UK law https://www.gov.uk/dismissal/unfair-and-constructive-dismissal https://www.gov.uk/dismissal/unfair-and-constructive-dismiss... Of course it might not be worth the lawsuit.
    - mattmanser 10y ago
      It's almost always worth the lawsuit, it's cheaper for a company to pay an employee off than fight them in court. The actual numbers of people who take abusive companies to court is low, just look up the statistics of companies who constructively dismiss women after pregnancies, compared to the number who actually get sued.
      - xyzzy123 10y ago
        It's a thing to do carefully; especially in a small industry. Unless the situation is pretty messed up it's generally better to take a small hit than become known as someone who litigates against their employer. On the other hand, full respect to anyone who stands up for themselves when the situation warrants it.
  - tehwalrus 10y ago
    I've heard that that practise (what a name!) Is relatively common in Japan: I've never heard of it in the UK before. I have heard of "gardening leave" though: where you're left on full salary but kept out of the building for your notice period, to stop you passing up to date market info to your new company. (It's the only legal way I know of in the UK to implement a non-compete clause.)
- mattmanser 10y ago
  You don't get 6 months salary, that's never been a thing. Unless there's something different in your contract, it's a week per year worked. A normal contract clause in the UK is that it's a month or 6 weeks notice both ways after a probationary period of 3 or 6 months, so that's usually a minimum. https://www.gov.uk/redundant-your-rights/redundancy-pay https://www.gov.uk/redundant-your-rights/redundancy-pay
  - tehwalrus 10y ago
    Thanks for correcting me, clearly I've only ever heard about it from people who had been working somewhere for a long time!
    - walshemj 10y ago
      You may be thinking of voluntary redundancy terms which can be very lucrative
- walshemj 10y ago
  And a in IR/HR terms a lay off is not exactly the same as a redundancy. With redundancy the job is 100% gone, with a layoff the job may come back ie a factory may lay off the night shift - with expectation that if things pick up the nightshift will be re hired.
jomamaxx 10y ago
Fired - you did something wrong, incompetent (or pissed someone off) and they are doing it specifically to you. Laid off - your group is redundant or discontinued, they have no need for you or your team/product, they're closing an overseas business unit, or culling 10% of their staff. You're in the wrong boat at the wrong time. It has different connotations.
wcummings 10y ago
If you're laid off, you can collect unemployment more easily.
- nannal 10y ago
  immediately vs 3 months waiting period as far as I recall
  - ToPutItBluntly 10y ago
    For California, that is wrong. You can claim right away if you are fired. The employer can dispute it however they have to prove they tried to rectify the situation. The way the system works, the former employee has to dispute the unemployment rejection if the employer wants to try to claim it was a valid firing. So if you do get fired and there was not a pattern of behavior or something that you were warned about, then you simply appeal, state your case and the judge will almost certainly reject the employers false claim. Unfortunately, I know this by experience. I was fired for some fishy business and it was obvious at the hearing. So always file for unemployment unless you are certain it will not be granted. Unemployment also qualifies you for health insurance through Covered California.

mixedCase 10y ago
It requires a certain kind of attitude that only a small minority of all people have to keep morale high in a situation where you can be fired any second without warning instead of going through the office looking like a kid who just shat his diapers.
buro9 10y ago
> In your opinion what hurts morale more? One big round of layoff, or multiple smaller rounds? Both hurt morale. I've seen many rounds of redundancy and layoffs in UK companies and both the huge layoff rounds and the slowly trimming back everywhere. With the big rounds, the "We'll only do this once so we'll do it big and won't do it again" is never true. The whole company knows it's just time but at least you can prepare. The axe is on a pendulum and if you give it a lot of momentum and swing from a great height it will swing back in good time and take off another chunk of the company. With the small rounds of denying there is an issue and trimming a person from each team, it feels like you are being hunted and it's easy to walk around and see that the company isn't doing enough to address whatever the issues are, it's too cautious. The axe is on a pendulum and if you only swing it a little the cadence is much higher and it will swing often and constantly slice of a little. The axe is on a pendulum, once it starts swinging it will swing again. It never swings just once.
- throw1988_9121 10y ago
  If I'm understanding this correctly, does this mean no company can recover from a situation where they had to let go of people?
  - CapitalistCartr 10y ago
    Companies are too cautious, too much in denial. The first cut is like a surgeon trainee making his first incision: too little, too late. Then comes the bigger cut, but its still not enough. Of course its not enough; by now the executives (who don't know what to do, who caused the mess and should be the first to go) have latched on to layoffs as the panacea to bring back the good times, the fruits of which they enjoyed but never understood. Layoffs can be necessary in a company, but they only work in conjunction with other actions, carefully managed together by leadership with vision and courage. I've watched executives argue over laying off a man that was costing them $5.00 per hour (and cleaning their bathrooms), but ignore everyone around the management meeting table.
  - buro9 10y ago
    The companies may survive, departments may survive. They'll need time to recover, rebuild, find new confidence and morale. But... in the short-term, once cuts start they don't stop. It's always too little too late. The big cuts are indicative of how bad things already are, the small cuts are indicative of how bag things are yet to get (but it is coming down the line and aimed at you). Once the axe starts swinging, be in control of your situation and look elsewhere. Don't wait to let the situation dictate to you.
    - swish_bob 10y ago
      That's not _necessarily_ true. I've worked at a company that expanded far too fast, and laid off a sizeable number of people. They then got some serious focus on the areas that they could do well, made good money and grew more sustainably. By the time I left they were substantially bigger than they had been, sustainably profitable and had been acquired. On the other hand, I've also been places where the cuts just kept on coming.
Naritai 10y ago
The small layoffs are not usually done for morale reasons; they're done to avoid having to give a WARN notice [1]. Even in cases where a WARN notice is not legally required, it is a PR problem to be admitting that you're laying staff off. People gossip, they think your products must not be good, new candidates have second thoughts, etc. But if you're just firing 1-2 people a week, then (you hope) nobody notices and you can keep putting on a happy public face. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraining_Notification_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...
mountaineer22 10y ago
I worked at a place, where I was not laid off, but my friend was, on his birthday. For me, this was a real eye-opener. It would not have been a big deal for HR to wait another day, and then lay him off. Another employee, also laid off, 2 days after moving out of his aunt's house and had put a deposit down on an apartment and DSL connection. I think I left a month later right before the company imploded.
- nannal 10y ago
  >but my friend was, on his birthday. I've had this happen good 20th.
  - rpazyaquian 10y ago
    I've had it happen too. Granted, it was kind of a bullshit zeroth job where it happened and the company folded a month later, but it still sucked. I almost brought in cupcakes to share with the company...
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- redboxcandy 10y ago
  Happened to a friend of mine while he was on his honeymoon. Through a slip by management people knew it was coming. He wanted to know before he left, but they wouldn't tell him. So he ended up checking his voicemail everyday while he was on his final vacation.
  - timv 10y ago
    Happened to a colleague of mine while he was on leave after the birth of his first child. He was allowed to come into the office one weekend (escorted by security) to collect his things. Welcome to fatherhood.
kchoudhu 10y ago
At banks I worked at, they did it once a year, HARD. Lots of loss of morale for two weeks after that...after which things stabilized again. During crises, it hit in waves. That was another kind of drawn out hell: people wondering "am I next?" aren't terribly productive.
scaryclam 10y ago
"Cut deep and cut once". Multiple rounds of layoffs is going to seed paranoia as well as hurt morale, so it's often better to over-do-it a little than end up with some of your best employees quitting because they're tired of wondering if they're next. I've seen both in action, and while the large layoff is really nasty, the company can immediately start to look forwards into rebuilding rather than sitting in the "was it enough, who's next?" purgatory.
- candiodari 10y ago
  As an ex-cisco employee I can say with absolute certainty that I will view any large company which "cuts deep and cuts once" with deep suspicion and paranoia, and with bad memories.

expertentipp 10y ago

> Berlin... 'start-up' > backed by Axel Springer These are already two red flags, enough for a person familiar with the Germany's job and tech markets to stay away.

elcct 10y ago
Care to elaborate?
- expertentipp 10y ago
  Berlin startups are infamous for hiring foreigners from countries with low salaries, ideally from outside of EU (so no free movement of workers with Germany) and paying them below the market salary. Low pay + dealing with German bureaucracy + sky rocketing prices of everything in Berlin = person has a problem. As for Axel Springer - their understanding of internet innovation is quite... "skewed". e.g. as some kind of manifest they blocked their tabloid's website (bild.de) for web browsers with enabled ad blockers or they are notorious for suing developers of ad blockers: http://www.reuters.com/article/germany-advertising-adblocking-idUSL5N0YJ31I20150528 http://www.reuters.com/article/germany-advertising-adblockin... Their philosophy seems to be "the internet is a platform to deliver advertisements" - quite toxic in my opinion.
  - elcct 10y ago
    Makes sense, thank you
  - elcapitan 10y ago
    They also think it's a good idea to get your content removed from Google, if they don't pay a fee for linking to you.
  - issaria 10y ago
    Chinese developer working in a Berlin startup here. I agree the Berlin startups do hire a lot of foreingers (there is a report stating that 49% of employees are foreigners), and it drives the salary down, but I can say my salary is the same level as others developers, as developers has such a huge demand here that you can change jobs freely, unlike American H1B visa. Also because the EU bluecard has a salary requirement, so they usually pays you the lower limit at least in order to get you here. That's the situation of my Mexican friend, he changed job as soon as he worked in the company for a year and get better paid.
    - mlent 10y ago
      Second this (as another non-EU citizen working in Berlin) -- you have to make at least 38k euros per year to work in Germany as a foreigner, which is enough to live comfortably in Berlin IMO. However, as you said, there are definitely plenty of companies that are paying more than this. Changing jobs is a non-issue when you're on the ground.
    - muyuu 10y ago
      Yeah but the requirements of the EU bluecard are in line with the EU average - low for Germany.
      - neokya 10y ago
        Not really for Berlin. It's more than average pay, see http://www.nuberlin.com/2016/01/average-salary-in-berlin/ http://www.nuberlin.com/2016/01/average-salary-in-berlin/ Also note, 38K is for person with science/engineering background. Otherwise, lower limit for EU Bluecard is around 48K
        muyuu 10y ago
        That seems a bit low. Here in London it's a waiter's salary.
        issaria 10y ago
        Well, giving that the GBP against EUR rate is like 1:1.1 at the moment, even if you have 70k anual salary Berlin, it's much less than who paid 70K in Berin, considering the living cost. And 70K is very reasonable now with Senior title, not to mention manage positions.
  - neokya 10y ago
    > dealing with German bureaucracy This is too much exaggeration. If you can find another job, dealing with bureaucracy is piece of cake. You just go to Foreign Registration Office and change company name.

throwaway2942 10y ago

Is there any more info you can provide? I dont want to sound combative, just curious because I have a lot of friends there and I havent heard anything. Is this happening for all employees? Do you think Crytek is holding on for robinson? I actually literally just got an offer a few weeks ago, this changes a lot. I know crytek had trouble before, but Im suprised these struggles are translating to the FFM studio.

germanthrowaway 10y ago
it applies to everyone and some are worse off than others. we have had emails sent to us from the bosses saying that we should not talk with people from the other studios but of course there is nothing that makes this impossible. under no circumstance should you take work at crytek. the reason for all of this is that the company as a whole has not had positive books for a long time and they did not look for money early enough. this means that they are now in a panic.
- throwaway2942 10y ago
  Intresting, Im suprised this hasnt gotten any coverage or attention really. This is the first time Ive heard of it, but it correlates with a recent change in attitute with some of my contacts there. Some outright dont respond to messages, others reply with "Things are fine" etc... Do you anticipate this getting more coverage in the comming days/weeks? When was the last missed paycheck if I may ask? Thanks again. Your doing good work informing people.
  - germanthrowaway 10y ago
    the reason for the coverage being low is that no one is saying anything and information on glassdoor is being ignored by most people anyway. full disclosure: i am from the sofia office but i think that this is dangerous to say because we are fewer than the germans. in the sofia office we have not been paid for two months now and before that we had to wait two months for salaries, so it makes a total of 4 months of waiting. i can confirm that the frankfurt office also has not received money but i am not able to say exactly what their situation is. 2 or 3 months. i dont think this will get coverage because i will not provide any evidence that will make it clear who i am. if someone can tell me how to prove this without being in danger with crytek i will do what i can.
    - throwaway2942 10y ago
      Generally the best way to do this is to post an email regarding NDA, payments, whatever sent to a large group and block out the "To" but keep the sender and as much of the content as possible. Up to you if you post it publicly, I couldnt see the harm there but alternatively you could email it from a disposable email to a gaming news site. They are very careful with their sources and can help. They have experience breaking stories like this. You should get a reply in less than 2h from most press sites for a story like this.
frik 10y ago
As soneone who reads just the news and liked their older games: I really don't understand why Crytek management did so many rather stupid decisions. Everyone told them, they are wrong, multiple times. The had one of the brst games with Far Cry 1 and Crysis 1. Then everything onwards went wrong. The started multiple developer studios. Developed boring console games like Rise. Dumbed down Crysis from an more open world shooter to a narrow map lacklustre Call of Duty clone with Crysis 2. Then they did a little known Crisis 3 and bet big on Free2Play games, everyone warned them, but the still went on and hit the wall big time. Then they lost several studios, were unable to pay devs, lost engine devs to Star Citizen, did the Amazon engine license deal. Then Unreal 4 engine was released "for free"(*), they reacted not optimal to this event. Now with their Free2Play strategy hit the ground, they bet big on VR and their writing is on the wall. Why can't the just focus on Triple-A games like Crysis 1? They have a very good engine, and had two Triple-A games. Really sad, but it doesn't look good reading the other comments.

amdavidson 10y ago
Wickr is based in SF. CA is an at-will state. Many companies prefer to have a strong paper trail and a lot of evidence to scare people away from filing wrongful termination suits, but he could have been fired just because the boss didn't like him without any legal repercussions.
scolson 10y ago
Obviously, they should consult a lawyer, but I want to clarify this point, because the parent comment can be very misleading. If you have a specific employment contract, all bets are off and only your lawyer and the courts can really determine what is/is not a permissible dismissal. Assuming no contract, "cause" needs vary by state, so you can't just trust the parent message. In At-Will states, most of the time, you can be fired for any reason (except protected reasons) at any time including "asking too many questions", "asking the wrong questions", "not asking enough questions", or "he/she looked at me funny and I was in a bad mood." All are perfectly valid reasons for an on-the-spot dismissal in an At-Will state. Now where it gets trickier is filing for unemployment. This can be harder to navigate than simple At-Will rules. In my state, all of the following will be docked against the employer for unemployment compensation: * Just felt like firing someone * Asks too many/not enough questions * Constant quality issues * Couldn't actually code and in a developer role In all of the above, it is expected that the employer either should have figured it out before hiring, or should train/retrain to address the situation. If an employer fires you for a policy violation, then unemployment will not be charged back to the employer (and likely the employee is not "unemployment eligible"). Usually this involves a longer paper trail with multiple meetings and "official" written notice of a policy violation in your company file before being terminated. Generally, this is a CYA thing for the employer so you cannot claim "you didn't know." Protip: If there is a bs policy that everyone violates, you can still be fired for-cause for violating it. Chances are if this happens, someone really doesn't like you and they want a good reason to get you out. But in all cases in an At-Will state, you are still out of a job. (PS: You notice I do not name my state. Since this is an already tricky situation, assume my state is fictitious, and the rules and experiences are equally made up. Ask your lawyer or the equivalent of your state's (un)employment department/commission/branch for how things apply in your state.)
- frenchman_in_ny 10y ago
  And if you have a specific employment contract (and you're in an at-will state), take a close look at it since it likely includes an arbitration clause. So going to a lawyer & the courts might make you feel like you're going to get a resolution, but likely you aren't going to get very far.
- JamesBarney 10y ago
  I think you are confusing termination in an at will state with "termination-with-cause" which means that you cannot collect unemployment, and cannot be rehired by the same firm.(or maybe I'm wrong) When someone asks if you've been fired by a previous company usually they are asking about the second. They will call the previous company and ask if you are eligible for rehire.
  - scolson 10y ago
    No, not confusing it. Your original message was WRT paper trail, which is not required in all cases. To your message here, fired means something very specific. Though fired can be for cause or no cause. And the reason of cause matters for unemployment. Laid off means something else. So really, there are four categories from an unemployment standpoint: 1. Fired - policy violation 2. Fired - "incompetent" (note: in the eyes of the employer) 3. Fired - no cause 4. Laid off Both 1 and 2 are bad for new job prospects. 3 is hit and miss from a job prospect perspective, but still generally negative. 4 has no impact. For unemployment in my state, 2, 3, and 4 will all let you collect (and bills back to the company who terminated the working relationship) where #1 makes you unemployment ineligible. Circling back to your original message about paper trail, #1 is the only one that companies essentially always keep (or should keep) the paper trail for in my state, because it is the only one that is needed to to defend the company in an unemployment hearing if it ever gets there. For the other categories, there may or may not be a paper trail, and it certainly isn't required.
    - JamesBarney 10y ago
      Do most companies when contacted by future prospective employers disclose which of these 4 was the reason for termination?
      - scolson 10y ago
        Depends on who is asking, what they ask, and for what reason. Though it is generally avoided. If it is a simple reference check (never minding why a terminating company would be listed as a ref...) then as little information as possible would be given; possibly as small as "so and so no longer works here and that is the limit of what we can disclose with them" in order to avoid a bad reference lawsuit. If it is an employment verification firm, depending on how rigorous the verification, it may come up by direct questioning and this should be expected by all parties. Some companies do have strict policies about not disclosing some/all details. I am aware of a few firms, that wether good or bad, have policies against providing any reference, similarly, to avoid any potential lawsuit. Now, when it comes to unemployment, if an ex-employee files a claim, the gloves will very likely come off. If the company can avoid a claim being made against their account, that is the difference of a lot of money on a recurring basis. So in this sense, reason very much matters.
coin 10y ago
> fire with cause Isn't it all at-will employment? Why is a reason necessary?

traviswingo 10y ago

I would honestly refrain from telling people you were fired in that case, and simply state you were laid off. I would then begin to infer that something fishy was going on internally and that you're probably better off not being involved with the company anymore. It really sounds to me like management didn't know how to deal with the situation and a "performance review" was simply their scapegoat, and not the reality of why they let you go. I wouldn't be surprised if you were performing at a high level and they were just trying to cut the team down to the originals. These things happen all the time. Good luck to you!

kyrra 10y ago
Agreed. If your former employer is smart, they won't say much beyond "yes, that person worked here" when contacted by any company that is looking to hire you. If they say anything that directly results in you being denied a job, it opens them up to lawsuits. (at least that's my understanding)
- mgkimsal 10y ago
  > If they say anything that directly results in you being denied a job, it opens them up to lawsuits. This is the received wisdom, but not sure it happens. It might be something that happens at high levels, but it's uncommon for most people to even get a rejection letter or email in the first place, this notion of companies badmouthing you then them telling you that's why you were not hired is just... weird. Someone would have to call/email your former company, they'd have to put something in writing (or recording) that specifically was negative about you, the company you are applying to would then need to keep a record of that, and then tell you why you weren't hired was because of that negative information. Has that ever happened to anyone? It feels to me like the 'lawsuits!' excuse is mostly a smokescreen to cover people being lazy, rude or incompetent at their job of actually managing a hiring process.
  - slgeorge 10y ago
    It may not happen, but many companies believe it could happen. Consequently, they say next to nothing about ex-employees - only the dates of employment. If you're the company being asked for the reference there is no upside in you saying that Joe was fired - why would you want to help another company, and why would you want to risk (however infinitesimal) a law suit. This is commonly defined by policy, simply ask the last company that you worked at what their policy is for references and what data they will reveal.
    - mgkimsal 10y ago
      I get that part, but even if past employer A said something to potential B, why would B say anything to me? It's just going to involve them in something they don't want to be part of in the first place.
    - hanginghyena 10y ago
      Sadly that is trivial to get around these days, especially if someone at the new company knows someone at the old one. Most professionals I know are happy to "bend" policy to give a respected colleague or personal friend a good reference, especially if that person is on the street. If the company clams up and limits its response to name, rank and serial number, that's a huge red flag.
    - jrnichols 10y ago
      I've worked for places that will not say anything about you at all. Nothing. They refuse to even say if you worked there or not, instead referring you to a service they use called The Work Number or something like that. It's really frustrating to try to look for a job when your potential employer really has a limited way of checking your references.
  - webmaven 10y ago
    Here is how it happens: You're applying at a bunch of places, some of them being internal referrals from friends of yours. After a while you notice that all of your job applications are fizzling out, so, frustrated, you start asking for feedback (especially since a friend of yours kept getting rejected for talking about SOA instead of RESTful APIs). The answers you get aren't helpful, like "we just felt that you weren't a good fit", and in a couple of cases somewhat antagonistic. Eventually, you hear through the grapevine that you might want to check the references you're using. So, you get your Significant Other to pose as an employer checking your employment history and references, while they record the calls with an app. Guess what? One of your references is actually trashing you, saying you were unreliable and a troublemaker. It also turns out that another reference just blows everyone off and never returns calls. Ta-da! You have a recorded evidence. BIG PROBLEM for the reference that bad-mouthed you.
    - mgkimsal 10y ago
      Cue people spouting how it's illegal for you to record a conversation.
      - sli 10y ago
        I suppose one could sidestep it by requesting permission to record for "review with the rest of the hiring team." Probably not a good idea, though. Confronting them on the phone is probably a worse idea, though. Realistically, though, if you're job hunting, filing lawsuits might not be the best use of time.
      - wayn3 10y ago
        lots of places in the US where recording a conversation is legal if one party of the conversation agrees to it (in this case, the party that does the recording)
        webmaven 10y ago
        Bingo.
    - 10y ago
- marme 10y ago
  it opens them up for lawsuit because they could have slandered you resulting in you losing a job opportunity. It does not mean the former employee will win but if you did say something that is grounds for the lawsuit which you will have to defend and prove what you said was all factually correct. It is cheaper to just settle with the former employee rather than pay lawyers to defend the suit even if you have 100% chance of winning. This is why no company will say anything other than yes that person worked here from x date to y date and maybe a handful of other benign facts about your employment such as your title
- scribdjobs 10y ago
  HR professional weighing in here :) You are correct. It's not just "if they're smart" it's "if they're complying with the law." Former employers are only legally allowed to confirm employment, salary (yes, really), and whether or not you're eligible for rehire.
  - driverdan 10y ago
    How is it illegal? Source? Do you mean they're opening themselves up to a lawsuit by saying anything else? If so, that's different than being illegal.
  - liquidcool 10y ago
    What state? Employment law varies considerably from state to state, and I didn't think that's federal law (but IANAL).
JamesBarney 10y ago
Most companies will answer two questions "When did Joe work here, and is Joe eligible for rehire?" This is why it's important for him to figure out if he was terminated-with-cause or not. If this was the case then he is not eligible for rehire and when a company does a background check Joe will run into this issue.
- abraae 10y ago
  Do you have any evidence about that? We are in the HR software field and in my experience being"eligible for rehire" is not a binary fact, and even if it was it might not be at the fingertips of the person giving the reference.
  - JamesBarney 10y ago
    This was my understanding talking to a couple of friends who were in H.R. They said their company's policy was to only let them answer these two questions. And they implied that this was similar for several other companies they worked for. So what I'm drawing this conclusion from is definitely anecdotal.