11 ms·

It's narcissistic BS corporate speak that ridicules the victims. We shouldn't stop pointing that out just because it's common.

imgabe 3y ago
Sorry, someone who gets laid off is not a victim. It's a known part of the deal of having a job. You might decide to quit and leave the employer. The employer might decide they don't need you anymore and lay you off. You both have that option. You know this going in and you both are supposed to make arrangements to be able to deal with this possibility.
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  You say that, but there are always cases of people getting laid off despite having positive performance reports, were hired shortly prior to RIF, were given assurances there would not be layoffs, etc. People don't continuously act like their jobs are precarious, even if the American system with its employer-tied insurance and other mediocre safety nets, should incentivize us to.
  - imgabe 3y ago
    > there are always cases of people getting laid off despite having positive performance reports, were hired shortly prior to RIF, were given assurances there would not be layoffs, etc. Right. And since we know this, isn't it basic common sense to ask yourself "what would I do if I lost my job tomorrow?" and have some savings and a plan? Especially if you're a relatively well-paid tech employee? It doesn't matter if you consider your job precarious or not, it's simply irresponsible to not be prepared for the possibility.
    - sarchertech 3y ago
      Sure and it’s probably a bad idea to walk alone in bad areas of town at night. That doesn’t mean that if you get shot while doing so that you aren’t a victim.
      - imgabe 3y ago
        The company is not mugging anyone. They are exercising their right to end a voluntary association. This is a perfectly valid choice that either party of the employment relationship may make. If you usually shop at grocery store A and you decide you don't want to any more and shop at grocery store B instead, you're not "victimizing" grocery store A.
        sarchertech 3y ago
        No one said that a company is mugging anyone. The point of the analogy is that failure to prepare doesn’t preclude being a victim. Most societies recognize that the employer to employee relationship is unbalanced in favor of the employer in a way that consumer to grocery store isn’t. Unemployment insurance, and severance requirements wouldn’t be necessary if the relationship were really the equally balanced market transaction you think that it is. Even the executives who do the laying off recognize the harm they are causing. I’ve been on calls with CEOs who were crying because they recognized (or wanted to appear that they recognized) the harm they were causing even if they thought it was justified. Victim is a perfectly reasonable word to describe the people on the receiving end of that harm.
    - Apocryphon 3y ago
      More than a fifth of Americans have no savings. At a certain point of spread, irresponsibility stops being a matter of personal character and becomes a systemic problem that concerns the public interest. https://www.newsweek.com/americans-have-burned-through-their-savings-1862843 https://www.newsweek.com/americans-have-burned-through-their...
      - imgabe 3y ago
        And there's a systemic solution, called unemployment insurance, that every company is required to pay into, and they pay more when they lay people off. What else would you have us do? These are grown professional adults we're talking about, not helpless wards of the state. It's not unreasonable to expect people to be able to take care of themselves.
        Apocryphon 3y ago
        Decouple health insurance from employment, for starters.
        imgabe 3y ago
        I don't necessarily disagree, but we're getting into the weeds here. My point is just that choosing to voluntarily end a business arrangement, within the the terms of the agreement, does not constitute "victimizing" someone. Otherwise, the employer could claim they're a victim when an employee quits. A store could claim they're a victim if a customer starts shopping at a different store, and so on. It's ridiculous. The tendency to cry victimhood at every obstacle is pernicious and debilitating to those who practice it. I would encourage people to avoid it.
        Apocryphon 3y ago
        The way I see it, mass layoffs are one of those situations where it feels unjust. A company might have acted incompetently, even recklessly, leading to people’s lives get disrupted. Are the executives culpable or were they victims of economic fortunes? Who knows? Either way, their positions often don’t change afterwards, and the companies stock price will usually rise as expenses fall with their workforce. So you have one set of people suffering, and others connected to the suffering being unaffected. Whether that connection is causation is up to interpretation. Either way the ethical calculus certainly feels imbalanced. You can use all the logic you want, but it’s hard to address the feeling of something amiss. It might not be arson, but it still feels like a controlled burn that went out of control.
- sarchertech 3y ago
  > Sorry, someone who gets laid off is not a victim. It's a known part of the deal of having a job. Death is a known part of the deal of living, and car accidents are known risks of driving a car. That doesn’t mean someone who dies in a car accident isn’t a victim. For many people there isn’t a realistic option other than employment.
- acdha 3y ago
  Sophistry aside, it’s still profoundly disruptive for many people. Whether or not they know there’s a risk, it means people are scrambling to reestablish their finances and routines, and in many cases that can have long-lasting impacts – people have to move, Americans have disruptions to their healthcare access & providers, and older people might never regain their old salary. That doesn’t make it illegal, or even a bad business move, but it very much has victims. They’re the ones being sacrificed for the good of the company.
  - sarchertech 3y ago
    Exactly. My wife is a highly paid doctor, but she can only work at a children’s hospital. If she were laid off we’d be fine financially, but we’d still have to relocate the entire family hundreds of miles away.
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    Riot is offering a minumum of six months of severance. I agree, layoffs are disruptive, but this view that somehow if you get hired the company can't ever decide to let you go is totally bizarre to me. Plus, what you would be essentially arguing is that it would have been better to never have hired these people in the first place, which I strongly disagree with in the vast majority of cases. People need to stop acting like layoffs are the worst, evilest thing that can happen. It's important that people are treated with dignity and a financial cushion, and at least according to this blog post that seems to be the case.
    - Apocryphon 3y ago
      Maybe those people would have been otherwise hired by employers who prudently didn’t overhire and need to cut afterwards.
      - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
        I think that's a fair point when you hear stories about people who are hired and then laid off within a couple months (or sooner). Nobody can predict the far future with accuracy, but those kinds of stories usually just point to corporate incompetence and the company usually could have planned better. But when it comes to cases where economic and business conditions have drastically changed, I don't think it's reasonable that we expect business leaders to have crystal balls for years in the future.
- ninjaK4t 3y ago
  This attitude of shrug and say “that’s how it works” seems common with older accounts. You know going into this the next generation can come along and change the rules. Maybe the past should have thought about that before having kids shrug Physics doesn’t put an obligation on us to serve the elders catechisms and chants. It does empower us to overwhelm through strength and raw numbers. Throwing up their hands is not a good political position of the generations who need to trust the next generations won’t just drug them up and stick them in poorly run state care.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- wegfawefgawefg 3y ago
  Unemployment played a large impact in my parents divorce. Which pretty much haunted me until 25. Unemployment is also the largest contributer to male suicide in the entire world. So while they are not victims of a crime or mistreatment, they are certainly victims of circumstance.
  - BizarreByte 3y ago
    This is all true, but acknowledging the harms caused to lives by layoffs is unpopular with the bootlicking type that's so prominent on HN. People are right to want to see real, impactful consequences for leaders who "take full responsibility" because if they in fact are taking it, they're taking responsibility the bad choices and mismanagement that lead to the layoffs and the consequences of said layoffs. People are tired of leadership huffing their own farts, posting a teary eyed message, and continuing their lives like nothing ever happened. If I fucked up and had an adverse effect on hundreds, possibly thousands of lives tomorrow I'd be fired on the spot, rightfully so too. > Unemployment is also the largest contributer to male suicide in the entire world. Imagine how many people have already tried, or succeeded as a direct result of layoffs in the last year as a direct consequence of mass layoffs. It's sickening to think about.
    - wegfawefgawefg 3y ago
      I think the fed has a lot to do with the layoffs.
      - BizarreByte 3y ago
        Anyone could have reasonably foreseen interest rate increases from historic lows, but of course company leaders got greedy and now those under them have to suffer for it.

imgabe 3y ago

Sorry, someone who gets laid off is not a victim. It's a known part of the deal of having a job. You might decide to quit and leave the employer. The employer might decide they don't need you anymore and lay you off. You both have that option. You know this going in and you both are supposed to make arrangements to be able to deal with this possibility.

Apocryphon 3y ago
You say that, but there are always cases of people getting laid off despite having positive performance reports, were hired shortly prior to RIF, were given assurances there would not be layoffs, etc. People don't continuously act like their jobs are precarious, even if the American system with its employer-tied insurance and other mediocre safety nets, should incentivize us to.
- imgabe 3y ago
  > there are always cases of people getting laid off despite having positive performance reports, were hired shortly prior to RIF, were given assurances there would not be layoffs, etc. Right. And since we know this, isn't it basic common sense to ask yourself "what would I do if I lost my job tomorrow?" and have some savings and a plan? Especially if you're a relatively well-paid tech employee? It doesn't matter if you consider your job precarious or not, it's simply irresponsible to not be prepared for the possibility.
  - sarchertech 3y ago
    Sure and it’s probably a bad idea to walk alone in bad areas of town at night. That doesn’t mean that if you get shot while doing so that you aren’t a victim.
    - imgabe 3y ago
      The company is not mugging anyone. They are exercising their right to end a voluntary association. This is a perfectly valid choice that either party of the employment relationship may make. If you usually shop at grocery store A and you decide you don't want to any more and shop at grocery store B instead, you're not "victimizing" grocery store A.
      - sarchertech 3y ago
        No one said that a company is mugging anyone. The point of the analogy is that failure to prepare doesn’t preclude being a victim. Most societies recognize that the employer to employee relationship is unbalanced in favor of the employer in a way that consumer to grocery store isn’t. Unemployment insurance, and severance requirements wouldn’t be necessary if the relationship were really the equally balanced market transaction you think that it is. Even the executives who do the laying off recognize the harm they are causing. I’ve been on calls with CEOs who were crying because they recognized (or wanted to appear that they recognized) the harm they were causing even if they thought it was justified. Victim is a perfectly reasonable word to describe the people on the receiving end of that harm.
  - Apocryphon 3y ago
    More than a fifth of Americans have no savings. At a certain point of spread, irresponsibility stops being a matter of personal character and becomes a systemic problem that concerns the public interest. https://www.newsweek.com/americans-have-burned-through-their-savings-1862843 https://www.newsweek.com/americans-have-burned-through-their...
    - imgabe 3y ago
      And there's a systemic solution, called unemployment insurance, that every company is required to pay into, and they pay more when they lay people off. What else would you have us do? These are grown professional adults we're talking about, not helpless wards of the state. It's not unreasonable to expect people to be able to take care of themselves.
      - Apocryphon 3y ago
        Decouple health insurance from employment, for starters.
        imgabe 3y ago
        I don't necessarily disagree, but we're getting into the weeds here. My point is just that choosing to voluntarily end a business arrangement, within the the terms of the agreement, does not constitute "victimizing" someone. Otherwise, the employer could claim they're a victim when an employee quits. A store could claim they're a victim if a customer starts shopping at a different store, and so on. It's ridiculous. The tendency to cry victimhood at every obstacle is pernicious and debilitating to those who practice it. I would encourage people to avoid it.
        Apocryphon 3y ago
        The way I see it, mass layoffs are one of those situations where it feels unjust. A company might have acted incompetently, even recklessly, leading to people’s lives get disrupted. Are the executives culpable or were they victims of economic fortunes? Who knows? Either way, their positions often don’t change afterwards, and the companies stock price will usually rise as expenses fall with their workforce. So you have one set of people suffering, and others connected to the suffering being unaffected. Whether that connection is causation is up to interpretation. Either way the ethical calculus certainly feels imbalanced. You can use all the logic you want, but it’s hard to address the feeling of something amiss. It might not be arson, but it still feels like a controlled burn that went out of control.
sarchertech 3y ago
> Sorry, someone who gets laid off is not a victim. It's a known part of the deal of having a job. Death is a known part of the deal of living, and car accidents are known risks of driving a car. That doesn’t mean someone who dies in a car accident isn’t a victim. For many people there isn’t a realistic option other than employment.
acdha 3y ago
Sophistry aside, it’s still profoundly disruptive for many people. Whether or not they know there’s a risk, it means people are scrambling to reestablish their finances and routines, and in many cases that can have long-lasting impacts – people have to move, Americans have disruptions to their healthcare access & providers, and older people might never regain their old salary. That doesn’t make it illegal, or even a bad business move, but it very much has victims. They’re the ones being sacrificed for the good of the company.
- sarchertech 3y ago
  Exactly. My wife is a highly paid doctor, but she can only work at a children’s hospital. If she were laid off we’d be fine financially, but we’d still have to relocate the entire family hundreds of miles away.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  Riot is offering a minumum of six months of severance. I agree, layoffs are disruptive, but this view that somehow if you get hired the company can't ever decide to let you go is totally bizarre to me. Plus, what you would be essentially arguing is that it would have been better to never have hired these people in the first place, which I strongly disagree with in the vast majority of cases. People need to stop acting like layoffs are the worst, evilest thing that can happen. It's important that people are treated with dignity and a financial cushion, and at least according to this blog post that seems to be the case.
  - Apocryphon 3y ago
    Maybe those people would have been otherwise hired by employers who prudently didn’t overhire and need to cut afterwards.
    - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
      I think that's a fair point when you hear stories about people who are hired and then laid off within a couple months (or sooner). Nobody can predict the far future with accuracy, but those kinds of stories usually just point to corporate incompetence and the company usually could have planned better. But when it comes to cases where economic and business conditions have drastically changed, I don't think it's reasonable that we expect business leaders to have crystal balls for years in the future.
ninjaK4t 3y ago
This attitude of shrug and say “that’s how it works” seems common with older accounts. You know going into this the next generation can come along and change the rules. Maybe the past should have thought about that before having kids shrug Physics doesn’t put an obligation on us to serve the elders catechisms and chants. It does empower us to overwhelm through strength and raw numbers. Throwing up their hands is not a good political position of the generations who need to trust the next generations won’t just drug them up and stick them in poorly run state care.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
wegfawefgawefg 3y ago
Unemployment played a large impact in my parents divorce. Which pretty much haunted me until 25. Unemployment is also the largest contributer to male suicide in the entire world. So while they are not victims of a crime or mistreatment, they are certainly victims of circumstance.
- BizarreByte 3y ago
  This is all true, but acknowledging the harms caused to lives by layoffs is unpopular with the bootlicking type that's so prominent on HN. People are right to want to see real, impactful consequences for leaders who "take full responsibility" because if they in fact are taking it, they're taking responsibility the bad choices and mismanagement that lead to the layoffs and the consequences of said layoffs. People are tired of leadership huffing their own farts, posting a teary eyed message, and continuing their lives like nothing ever happened. If I fucked up and had an adverse effect on hundreds, possibly thousands of lives tomorrow I'd be fired on the spot, rightfully so too. > Unemployment is also the largest contributer to male suicide in the entire world. Imagine how many people have already tried, or succeeded as a direct result of layoffs in the last year as a direct consequence of mass layoffs. It's sickening to think about.
  - wegfawefgawefg 3y ago
    I think the fed has a lot to do with the layoffs.
    - BizarreByte 3y ago
      Anyone could have reasonably foreseen interest rate increases from historic lows, but of course company leaders got greedy and now those under them have to suffer for it.