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Why would you fire people on such a short notice? No need to hand over things? No interest in providing at least some time to look for a new job? EDIT: To clar

• Selfcommit 9y ago
  The transition is being handled with as much dignity as possible - The company is also offering to help place people through USV.
  • criddell 9y ago
    It wasn't possible to give more notice? Do you know why?
    • fourseventy 9y ago
      I've never heard of a company giving advanced notice of layoffs. Its always just an email the morning of.
      • danbruc 9y ago
        Usually you will get at least a 4 week notice in Germany and this increases to up to 7 months when you worked for more than 20 years for the company. That you get fired effective immediately usually only happen if you really fucked something up.
        • dragonwriter 9y ago
          The US has much weaker employee protections. Aside from workers in unions and certain protected scenarios, layoffs usually occur with zero notice. (And, often, when associated with public bad financial returns, shortly after management denies any layoffs are coming.)
          • pkaye 9y ago
            The WARN act is part of US labor law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraining_Notification_Act_of_1988 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini... For larger companies with layoffs beyond a threshold, they employer must give 60 days notice. I think they can instead give 60 days severance.
            • dragonwriter 9y ago
              Yeah, but the threshold is quite large; 500+ workers at a single site, or both 50-499 workers and over a third of the site workforce. The Stack Overflow layoffs are 60 people and 20% of their workforce, and so wouldn't (even at a single site) be subject to the WARN Act’s 60-day notice requirement.
              • pkaye 9y ago
                True it could be stronger. Some states like California have more stringent versions.
        • derefr 9y ago
          "Layoff" and "firing" are separate concepts here. The central example of a true layoff is a trade work shortage: the layoff happens with very little notice, because it reflects the volatile nature of the demand for the trade. If there's suddenly, unexpectedly nothing for anyone to do, then there's suddenly, unexpectedly no benefit in paying anyone to come in for the day to do it. Does that kind of situation still confer protections in Germany? If so, how do German manufacturing companies manage to not go bankrupt? Do all the companies subscribe to huge insurance pools?
          • danbruc 9y ago
            As far as I know the barriers are even higher for layoffs. You can not, for example, arbitrarily pick which workers to layoff but have to minimize the social impact when you have to choose between several employees doing the same work, for example take age, spousal support, and things like that into consideration. But I am totally not an expert and I am sure it is a vastly more complex topic than I can imagine.
            • pc86 9y ago
              This seems backwards to me. Because my spouse has a better job than Mike's, I'm more likely to get laid off? Because I'm younger than Bill and can theoretically make up the financial impact sooner I'm more likely to get laid off? If there are ten employees you need to cut, shouldn't they be cut based on either their recent performance, or a completely random method?
              • fjsolwmv 9y ago
                Welcome to the world of progressive taxation. The more secure you are, the more you pay.
              • pas 9y ago
                In a hard time it tries to do the thing with the less overall impact. Maybe it's putting lipstick on a pig, maybe it's fairness. Layoffs (mass dismissal) are very hard, because usually it means the whole region has economic problems, and those that get laid off are especially vulnerable - because they almost by definition work in a sort of dying industry/trade.
        • zeefoo 9y ago
          It's the norm in the US, I've never head of anyone getting advanced noticed of termination.
        • pc86 9y ago
          These layoffs weren't in Germany, so I'm not sure that German law is relevant.
      • shagie 9y ago
        http://www.edd.ca.gov/jobs_and_training/Layoff_Services_WARN.htm http://www.edd.ca.gov/jobs_and_training/Layoff_Services_WARN... > Per Chapter 4, Part 4, Sections 1400-1408 of the Labor Code, WARN protects employees, their families, and communities by requiring that employers give a 60-day notice to the affected employees and both state and local representatives prior to a plant closing or mass layoff. Advance The layoff that I was part of in '09 in California (Netapp, ~500 employees let go, about 6% of staff) had two different groups in the IT side of the house: A. Out the door now. B. Pick your brain for some time. The out the door now were let go immediately, though they were on payroll for 60 days. They weren't allowed in the building, but they were technically still employees. Severance package followed the 60 days. The pick your brain group which I was part of were still allowed in and we worked. We had 30 days to sign a "increase pay and pick brain from Feb until July" or out the door with 30 days left on the WARN (if I remember it correctly). Come July, the 60 day window kicked in and then the severance package. I am of the understanding that this approach isn't unusual with tech companies.
        • JBlue42 9y ago
          Interesting. Company I used to work for reduced their LA office to a handful of people after laying off 2/3 of its workers to move operations to Vancouver. Everyone was considered 'contract' despite being on W2s so not sure. I think we did get a notice but not months to look for new work. I had a week.
• rando444 9y ago
  Likely security. It's not mutually exclusive to helping people with their future prospects. We know nothing about severance, job assistance, etc. You can't really infer anything about this subject from that tweet.
• valuearb 9y ago
  Why would you give notice? Leaving people dangling for weeks while you figure out who will be cut is worse than making the decision, telling them it's effective immediately and giving a fair severance package so they can immediately start looking.
  • blazespin 9y ago
    The question isn't so much notice as it is severance. As long as the severance package is good, notice isn't that important.
  • foepys 9y ago
    You decide who needs to get cut and notify only those people. Then they have a few weeks to search for a new job and get their things in order.
    • hermitdev 9y ago
      Yes, but you forget "water cooler talk". Having worked at a large hedge fund that went through a massive layoff after a sub par year (we still made 10%) that resulted in 2/3s of all IT employees, roughly 600 people, being terminated. The announcement was made over email. First, all consultants/contractors were immediately shown the door. Those we wanted to keep were converted to salaried employees. This was the week before Thanksgiving in the US. Volunteers to be laid off from employees were asked for the Monday before Thanksgiving. Long of it was morale tanked. I informally asked my director to be let go and was told not to formally ask for it as they weren't going to cut me and it wouldn't look good in my official record. I saw a lot of friends and great developers walked out the door. The layoff was bad enough in of itself, but watching it dragged out over a few weeks was brutal.
  • brazzy 9y ago
    The idea is to give notice after you figure out who will actually be cut, so that you can have an orderly handover of responsibility and knowledge. That's how it's done in sane countries because notice periods are proscribed by law. And no, it does not lead to people vandalizing their workplace.
• srcmap 9y ago
  Maybe the pressure was slowly building up from investors/board. They wanted the returns, profit, path to IPO , VC's carry for the Nth largest site of the internet. From the https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stack-overflow https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stack-overflow, the first round was from 2010 - 7 years ago. USV will like to get their exit soon.
  • fjsolwmv 9y ago
    I don't know, I figure that SO's investors made billions via value SO created for their other portfolio company. Investing in SO is like building a well or a power plant.
• Ralfp 9y ago
  Depends on country too. In EU our work laws regulate how your employee may be laid off. My country (poland) says that employee has to be notified about termination: - week ahead if he or she was employed for less than month - month ahead if he or she was employed for less than three years - three months ahead if he or she was employed for more than three years This goes both ways however, as employee has to notify his employeer on same basis that he or she quits. This introduces amount of games to recruitment process, where company frequently not only has to make bet by deciding to hire somebody, but also make sure that they'll wont be outbid during the three months that have to pass for person to change employeer
  • antiphase 9y ago
    This only applies to permanent workers though. Contractors or temporary staff may be employed on much shorter terms.
    • majidazimi 9y ago
      I'm a student assistant at SAP in Germany. Even I (as a part time hourly-paid employee) have a one month notice period.
      • flanbiscuit 9y ago
        And you have to do it on the first of the month right? Because the one month doesn't become affective until the first of the month so if you quit mid-month then you actually have a month and a half left at the company. At least this is what I was told by a friend who lives and works in Berlin as a tech recruiter.
  • BrandoElFollito 9y ago
    Same in France and the majority of EU countries.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
• tryingagainbro 9y ago
  Let's say that the law requires a 90 day notice. Maybe you can fire them today--as long as you pay them for 90 days while they sit at home. The spirit of the law is that you have sometime to look for another job so it's all covered. My point is that we don't know the details, a tweet is way too short.
• ProAm 9y ago
  It's start up life, iterating off VC money. Fail fast also means fire fast.
  • colejohnson66 9y ago
    Is it even possible to call Stack Exchange a startup anymore?
    • ProAm 9y ago
      It definitely is, they dont have a solid monetization plan, consistently pivot/iterate product ideas and take quite a bit of VC money. It's something that has gone from MVP and is trying to transform into a real business.
      • fjsolwmv 9y ago
        Sometimes you just Robin Hood your VCs to build something wonderful to give to the world.
• dogruck 9y ago
  Companies benefit from terminating with zero notice, and subsequently providing money and services to facilitate the employees transitions. Labor seeks regulations that makes it difficult to be suddenly terminated. The primary downside is that companies are reluctant to hire employees.
  • keganunderwood 9y ago
    I'm OK being "instantly" terminated as long as you pay me for the duration of the notice period.
    • dogruck 9y ago
      I agree with you, but many people do not share our view. The general counter argument is that if you make it difficult for companies to terminate employees, then companies will search for alternate mechanisms to sustain profitability. For example, instead of terminating an employee, the company might reduce executive pay, or pass the increased expenses on to customers. Again, I agree with you.
      • pjc50 9y ago
        > instead of terminating an employee, the company might reduce executive pay, Well that won't happen. Apart from a few cases where executives agree to take all their compensation in equity to rescue a failing business, they tend to pay themselves first, sometimes at the cost of the long term health of the business. Philip Green / BHS is the example that comes to mind.
        • dogruck 9y ago
          To be fair, your example is not a counterpoint because the company also collapsed. I think you’d have to show examples where a company: 1. Was not allowed to fire employees, 2. Executives did not take a pay cut, 3. The company continued to do well.
          • 9y ago
• Matt3o12_ 9y ago
  This probably depends a lot on the industry but my mom works at a grocery store and the reason they give short notices (as short as allowed by law) is because of the work moral. In Germany, there is no such thing as sick days, you can take off as long as you need if you are sick and have a doctors notice (which is mostly free or very inexpensive because of public healthcare). Most of the time someone is laid off, this person will suddenly become sick for most of their remaining time. When they come to work, they often procrastinate a lot more and get little to no work done. This means, once they have been given notice, they barely work and the employer can do very little. They cannot get fired (because they already are) and have to keep paying them for that duration. The same also often happens when the employee gives notice. While the employer can take legal action and sue them, proving that someone is sick is rather difficult (and frowned upon by most judges). There are many cases where my mother's employer could have easily proven that (because witnesses same him partying or there are even pictures online where he partied on that day) but it is generally not worth it because a trail is more expensive then paying one month's pay and also not worth the time and overhead. Not everyone takes work very seriously, unfortunately, which makes the process suck for everybody. When my mother's boss has an opportunity to fire them eithout notice (because they are late or caught steeling), he generally does that, which is super unfair for the employees who would have worked until their very last.
• gaius 9y ago
  No need to hand over things? Correct. Remember ROLES are made redundant, not people. If the role no longer exists then by definition there's nothing to handover. If there is a handover then there better also be a big chunk of cash to the departing worker in return for waiving the right to sue, because if there isn't, it's tribunal time.
  • fjsolwmv 9y ago
    That's a very simplistic view of the way work is distributed in a small company .
    • gaius 9y ago
      That would be for a tribunal to decide. But at the point that your employment is terminated, why would you do it?
• mathattack 9y ago
  The short notice is if the work is going away. It's an independent decision from how well they'll treat people going away. My most recent fund was similar - once they decided someone should go, they preferred to pull the trigger very quickly even if the severance was generous. (There's a toll on the org for having people stick around with negative attitude)