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Being able to easily lay off employees means that the companies are much happier hiring, too. Most of those fired will likely land another job soon, precisely b
by ptero 4y ago
Being able to easily lay off employees means that the companies are much happier hiring, too. Most of those fired will likely land another job soon, precisely because their new employer does not have to treat their hiring as a multi-year commitment.
Europe, which makes it very hard to let an employee go, tends to have significantly higher unemployment than the US, which is much more cavalier about layoffs. My 2c.
- gwright 4y agoAlmost as if TANSTAAFL.
- metadat 4y agoFirst encounter with this initialism. TANSTAAFL / TINSTAAFL "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tanstaafl.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tanstaafl.asp Also, if I may add: I wish there were more substance in your comment. This non-sequitur was disappointing.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- gwright 4y agoYeah, there could have been a lot more substance but to be honest a disappointingly large number participants here don't seem to understand that very basic principle when they engage in discussions here. To be clear, the parent to my comment seemed to completely understand TANSTAAFL. My comment was very obliquely directed at other participants in the larger conversation who seem to think that there is no legitimate reason for an employer to ever let a single employee go because any competent business will work like an oracle and make perfect business decisions always. Any unexpected outcome must be because they are greedy corporate monsters that don't care about their employees. (my apologies for the exaggeration but you should have seen what I wrote and deleted previously :-)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ThrowawayR2 4y agoMost hackers would already know TANSTAFFL through Robert Heinlein's works?
- 778hbff 4y ago[flagged]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- midoridensha 4y agoJapan makes it very hard to lay off employees too, but unemployment is very low.
- lll-o-lll 4y agoAlso Australia. From the outside (and this could well be the wrong take), it seems as though “at will employment” leads to cultural problems. People are afraid to speak their mind, and hierarchy becomes dominant. I like that Australia is a bit more egalitarian, and people can “speak truth to power”.
- 778hbff 4y agoHaving worked salary jobs in tech in both countries, I can tell you that hierarchies are a much bigger thing in Germany than in the U.S. In tech companies as well as in academia, FWIW. Her Professor, Herr Direktor, these are actually still a thing in Germany.
- OOPMan 4y agoYou might want to rephrase that because the way you stated it just seems kinda silly, as if somehow titled-obsessed idiots don't exist in US companies or something...
- lll-o-lll 4y agoI have worked in UK/Aus and for US owned/run and French owned/run (from aus) and aus owned/run (and others, I’m getting old). There definitely seemed to be a cultural difference with US based employees being much more reluctant to say anything negative (but this may have been nothing to do with at-will). I had assumed this was because they were afraid of losing their jobs by pissing off the wrong person, but it may well be something else entirely causing that. In Australia, you have the opposite problem of randoms going “that’ll never work” to a CEO (which is not exactly endearing).
- thisarticle 4y agoJapan also has a stagnant or declining labor pool size.
- makeitdouble 4y agoEurope makes it _costly_ to let an employee go. You can get rid of 20 people for next monday if you want to, you’ll just pay the due amount as defined in the contract and the law. It’s also not some astronomical amount, worst case scenario I think it’s around 6 months of pay, which isn’t that far from what you’d pay for a non compete for instance. PS: also unemployment is a complicated figure, it’s hard to tell how much any specific variable impacts it. Unemployment rate goes up and down while laws stay mostly the same, so singling out labor laws is mostly an opinion at this point.
- rgavuliak 4y agoLot of devs in Europe do contract work though. It's an employee disguised as a contractor so mostly as grey area, but it's becoming more common.
- makeitdouble 4y agoYes. Companies having that choice is also interesting in that they get to decide if it's worth to have people come and go, as a replaceable resource. For some company it totally works and they plan their staffing in 6 months spans (seen a small web agency basically having an "on" and "off" season, with half of the staff during the dead part), removing or adding people as they see fit. For others it's more difficult and they're pretty happy to have staff that can't just disappear within a month if they decide to go tour the Silk Road on a bike.
- kakoni 4y agoIn Finland its actually easy and cheap to do massive layoffs at once. But very difficult and costly to let single employee go.