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>I think if employees feel slighted by being fired, they're fooling themselves. The best mindset is that you could be gone tomorrow. It gives you clarity and pu

• babyshake 4y ago
  Even if doing huge amounts of hiring during good times and quickly pivoting to doing large layoffs during bad times is ethical, it sure does seem wasteful and not indicative of great leadership. Although it does seem to be the norm now, if recent years are any indication.
  • thethimble 4y ago
    Well it’s not clear that anyone could have predicted the timing of this downturn. Just a few months ago people were painting a very rosy picture for the future. In that context, metering investment can have a huge opportunity cost as well. I’m not advocating for CB - just suggesting that it’s harder to predict the future than you are implying.
    • TAForObvReasons 4y ago
      That's still a very employer-centric view. If the company reasonably expects a downturn at some point, it should be preparing with right-sized sustainable hiring. It's not "metering investment" but rather "building a sustainable business". Rushing to hire as many people as possible, then firing during a downturn, creates the impression that employees are cannon fodder.
    • synaesthesisx 4y ago
      We knew that rates going up was inevitable, and that crypto is essentially a sponge for excess liquidity. We knew that inflation was inevitable (to an extent) given the Fed's actions over the last two years. Upon observation of the current macroeconomic environment, it appears that either markets did not properly price in rate hikes, or there is something far worse happening that will ultimately trigger a valuations reset.
    • baq 4y ago
      Exact timing? No. General direction? There are people who made that call in November, plenty more joined January-February. Note the question is where does this end and those same people are the first to admit nobody knows, because the fed doesn’t know - and the answer is, when the fed pivots.
• tschellenbach 4y ago
  It does seem insane to me that healthcare is tied to employment.. that's just crazy
  • boringg 4y ago
    This part never makes sense to me. I've had friends stay in jobs to keep getting healthcare treatment - it's not great.
    • Apocryphon 4y ago
      It's a complete relic from the WWII era.
      • xapata 4y ago
        It's a relic from the days when Americans only wanted "upstanding citizens" to get subsidized healthcare.
        • tzs 4y ago
          It actually came about due to labor shortages during WWII. So many people were drafted into the military or voluntarily joining that employers were having trouble finding enough workers. To prevent this from leading to rampant inflation the US passed laws that regulated wages and prices, such as the Emergency Price Control Act of 1942 and the Stabilization Act of 1942. Insurance and pension benefits were not counted as wages, and so employers that could no longer legally raise wages to get people people to come work for them instead started offering health coverage. Americans, who before this had largely been on their own when it came to healthcare, liked this, and so even after the wage controls ended unions bargained to keep those benefits and over the next decade or two expand them to include vision and dental benefits. By the early '60s it was clear that there was a serious problem inherent in this. Employer sponsored health insurance had become that basis for nearly the entire American healthcare system. People who then left that system such as when they retired often found they could not afford to buy their own insurance. And so Medicare and Medicaid were created to try to handle people who could not get employer provided health insurance. We almost got major healthcare reform in the early '70s. Senator Kennedy proposed a single-payer system that would be available to every American. President Nixon proposed a system that pretty close to the ACA (aka Obamacare). Then Watergate happened and pushed healthcare reform to the back burner were it sat for around 40 years.
• boringg 4y ago
  What glorious risk-free world do you live in? The low volatile relatively risk free last decade and a half just vanished the next 5 - 10 years is going to be a much rougher ride. 14 week severance bare minimum at a private company? That sounds very rich. [edited for better manners]
  • alphabetam 4y ago
    c) European.
    • Broken_Hippo 4y ago
      I was going to reply the same. Heck, you don't even have to actually be European if you just read what protections you have in other places.
    • daenz 4y ago
      According to this[0], the absolute most generous package is the Netherlands, which offers 1/3 of your monthly salary for each year of employment. To receive 14 weeks of salary, you'd need to work at a company for 10 years. Coinbase was founded in 2012. Other "European" countries have much worse severance packages. So what Coinbase offered seems to be better than even the best country in Europe. 0. https://www.claimsattorney.com/2020/05/understanding-severance-pay-requirements-in-western-europe https://www.claimsattorney.com/2020/05/understanding-severan... EDIT>> Correcting years
      • meheleventyone 4y ago
        Don’t mistake the legal statutory minimums with normal practice.
        • daenz 4y ago
          Are you suggesting that European countries regularly offer severances to all employees that exceed what is legally required? Can you provide a source?
• ycta2022061413 4y ago
  Unfortunate that workers have internalized the idea that they are disposable tools and not long-term assets. It wasn't that long ago that large corporations like IBM and GE prided themselves on how many people they employed, how much salary they paid and even how much in tax $ they gave to the gov't[1]. 1: https://www.npr.org/2022/06/01/1101505691/short-term-profits-and-long-term-consequences-did-jack-welch-break-capitalism https://www.npr.org/2022/06/01/1101505691/short-term-profits...
• AlexandrB 4y ago
  I think the parent's statement was descriptive, not normative. The writing was on the wall when unions became scarce and "at-will employment" became the norm. The fact that things shouldn't be like this doesn't change the fact that they are like this.
• antihero 4y ago
  Get paid for two months to party/holiday/rest, the have another whole month (paid) to lazily job hunt in a crazy hot market and walk into the next place with a 10-30k raise. Happened to me a few times, was fucking awesome. Lack of healthcare would have been a worry but I’m in the U.K. where we get it free. How hard is it to fund your own US insurance on a tech salary to tide you over?
  • Bluecobra 4y ago
    > How hard is it to fund your own US insurance on a tech salary to tide you over? Healthcare is NOT cheap if you want to maintain the same plan. I had to pay $2K a month for a family plan under COBRA several years ago. This is the same as a mortgage payment for me. Typically your employer bears the majority of your insurance cost, but you pay all of it under COBRA.
    • antihero 4y ago
      Oh wow that is absolute madness. That covers your costs for pretty much everything, right?
      • Bluecobra 4y ago
        Not necessarily. There’s deductibles that need to be met, Copays, and co-insurance (what you pay after the deductible), rather you’re in network or out of network, etc. For example, I had pneumonia some time ago and was in the hospital for about 10 days. The hospital billed by insurance something silly like $100,000. I ended up having to pay something like $4,000 out of pocket. I consider myself one of the lucky ones. It’s really important to review an employer’s health plans before accepting a job offer.
      • dghlsakjg 4y ago
        Not at all. You will still have to pay your yearly deductible which is normally in the thousands of dollars. Then you also get to pay co-pays for every service regardless of where your deductible stands. Don't forget that the insurance company gets to decide what is necessary, not your doctor.
• Sindrome 4y ago
  You signed an employment-at-will agreement. You have no rights.
• usefulcat 4y ago
  Sincere question: would you give up your right to quit "on a whim" if your employer gave up their right to fire you "on a whim"?
  • cupofpython 4y ago
    I would, yes. 30 day terms would work for me as it does for many business to business agreements. I dont agree with the other commentators entitlement to 14 weeks of severance pay in any situation, however
  • Afforess 4y ago
    Yes? The power imbalance there is obvious. Employers have much greater access to wealth, capital, and lobbyists. As an individual I have no such agency. So yes, trading away risk in exchange for fixed contracts is a great deal in most circumstances. Most of modern finance exists to exchange risk for dollars in some sense.
  • flatiron 4y ago
    i don't think that's equivalent. it's tremendously easier for a company to fill a position than a person get another position somewhere else. this is a billion+ company. some developers probably live paycheck to paycheck.
  • Blahah 4y ago
    No, because humans and their needs are much more important than companies and the profits of their owners.
  • lkrubner 4y ago
    This is not a hypothetical in Britain. Many categories of workers cannot be fired on a whim, nor can they quit on a whim. Many people prefer that trade-off. For example, in 2012, at Timeout, Aksel Van der Wal was promoted to CEO. He had previously been the CTO, and now we needed a new CTO. We made an offer to a person who had a great reputation as an engineering manager at another company. But he was on a contract he could not get out of, nor would his employer let go of him. So we had to wait 9 months, while he finished that contract, before he could join us.
• derefr 4y ago
  Someone could come along and ruin your life by framing you for some morally-awful social-presumption-of-guilt crime. Or a nuclear war could start tomorrow with a strike on your city. Or a tiny little meteorite could happen to fall directly on you. Or God could stop+terminate the VM containing the universe mid-run. The insecurity and stress are the human condition, my friend. That's what it means to be sentient.
  • gusgus01 4y ago
    I think there's quite a statistical difference between being laid off and the situations you listed.
  • ldthorne 4y ago
    That is a false equivalency. We (theoretically) have control to improve and enhance workers' rights, and can make legislative changes to increase job security, or decouple the ability to live and subsist with employment.
  • helmholtz 4y ago
    What the fuck? So one should actively go out and seek more of it? To me, BECAUSE things are uncertain, there's even more value in things that can be made certain. Then, we at least have the hope of being free to devote our limited, anxiety-riddled, conflict-avoidant, procrastinating brains on the parts that matter. I don't want to have to worry about things like health insurance or the wham-baam-thank-you-ma'am nature of US Capitalist idiocracy.
  • myle 4y ago
    You are arguing that because very negative but also very unlikely events that we can't control, may happen, we shouldn't as society try to improve the conditions of our lives?
    • derefr 4y ago
      No? What I'm saying is that there is no such thing as true security; and so you've just got to learn to live with the feeling of insecurity, regardless of what social safety nets you put into place. Even in a much better world, you will be fundamentally insecure. Let me rephrase my original post: "We all die someday — and potentially sooner than you expect. There's no guarantee that any particular person will survive the next 24 hours. Even living in a bunker in the middle of nowhere, you could still have a heart attack!" This is entirely distinct from the question of whether you should advocate for societal policies that make quality-of-life more robust/fault-tolerant to small upsets. I'm all for that. My point is more that even if you do achieve a social-welfare utopia, you'll still likely be insecure and stressed, because mortality. And, therefore, "insecurity" and "stress" aren't good indicators of anything other than having an overriding awareness of one's own mortality. So it's not sensible to base policy decisions on trying to lower them. Base your policy positions on rational utility-maximization, not on trying to achieve personal emotional well-being. You want emotional well-being? Go to therapy.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• sacrosancty 4y ago
  You still have your career and can get another job somewhere else. If your whole industry has collapsed so you have no alternatives, then that's a risk to prepare for in your general life plans. The world doesn't owe you comfort and security but you can easily create it for yourself if that's what you want. Also, obviously don't work at a crypto startup if you want that either! I've done this for myself. I can't be fired, and I have 3 different "career" directions I'm going in at the same time. I'm not a high flier in any of them, but at least one is bound to always be available. That's comfort and security.
  • moneywoes 4y ago
    Any suggestions for getting this done? In a similar boat looking for some safety net. Are you describing overworked?
    • sacrosancty 4y ago
      Teacher is a fairly safe fall-back. I also happened to get lucky building a succecssful commercial software product, and have another degree and a little experience in engineering. I'm not overworked but I should make it clear that I'm not senior or particularly successful in any of those fields, buy also have no worries about money.
• yodsanklai 4y ago
  It is actually the bare minimum in many European countries (where you would also get unemployment benefits).