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> I agree. The only reason it’s “inhumane” to lay people off is because of our horrible safety net and ridiculous cost of education. It goes way beyond that po

> I agree. The only reason it’s “inhumane” to lay people off is because of our horrible safety net and ridiculous cost of education. It goes way beyond that point. Your tenure in a company requires you to specialize and develop your skills to meet the needs of your employer. When you are fired then the employability of those skills might be none or even detrimental to finding jobs anywhere else. The longest you work for an employer, the more potential you risk losing. Also, you will leave an employer at a different stage in your life. Your ability to allocate your time and energy to onboard onto the requirements of another company can be severely limited due to factors like your family responsibilities or even your health and energy levels. Working for a company always requires you to waste potential that could be used. Lastly, you will make life decisions around your work. For example, you might buy a home based on factors such as where your workplace is, your job requirements, and your salary range. If you're forced to switch jobs you might be forced to sell your home at a point in time that is detrimental to your interests. For a company, an employee is expendable. For an employee, being fired can and often has a profound detrimental impact in their life, physically, mentally, emotionally, economically, and socially as well. A job is not a mere business deal. A job is a social contract. An employer demands employees to make life changes around them, and employees are expected to comply. It's profoundly unfair and one-sided to make believe that an employee's social responsibilities only go as far as their paycheck.

dmn322 4y ago
I agree with you that it’s extremely unbalanced. However, i would say that a decent enough safety net would make most of that irrelevant. The problem is that our livelihood depend on the empathy of employers, when in reality empathy doesn’t enter into the equation. In fact asking for employers to use empathy only makes the problem worse. Because then the ones who actually have it use it, then they are surpassed by those without it. So the world is even more slanted toward those without empathy. It also prolongs the problem by letting people ignore the problem because it’s not that bad yet. Companies run on machine language. Legalistic policies and KPI’s are a form of machine language. There’s no empathy in that. It’s no easier to make a company act responsibly and ethically toward people than it is to make a computer do so. If we were working for computers, we wouldn’t expect them to give us quality of life out of the kindness of their hearts, we’d define the inputs and outputs, policies etc, and create a context that manages their lack of empathy and prevents it from destroying everything

dmn322 4y ago

I agree with you that it’s extremely unbalanced. However, i would say that a decent enough safety net would make most of that irrelevant. The problem is that our livelihood depend on the empathy of employers, when in reality empathy doesn’t enter into the equation. In fact asking for employers to use empathy only makes the problem worse. Because then the ones who actually have it use it, then they are surpassed by those without it. So the world is even more slanted toward those without empathy. It also prolongs the problem by letting people ignore the problem because it’s not that bad yet. Companies run on machine language. Legalistic policies and KPI’s are a form of machine language. There’s no empathy in that. It’s no easier to make a company act responsibly and ethically toward people than it is to make a computer do so. If we were working for computers, we wouldn’t expect them to give us quality of life out of the kindness of their hearts, we’d define the inputs and outputs, policies etc, and create a context that manages their lack of empathy and prevents it from destroying everything