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> workers can be terminated only for misconduct or another such reason This is such a weird request for technology workers. You want to work with low-performin
by stickfigure 2y ago
> workers can be terminated only for misconduct or another such reason
This is such a weird request for technology workers. You want to work with low-performing coworkers?
- afh1 2y ago[flagged]
- drawkward 2y agoSeems like a hiring problem, not a firing problem.
- VWWHFSfQ 2y agoI have lots of experience hiring tech people. Most of the time they turn out to be just as good as we thought they would be. But sometimes they don't. It would be terrible if it was impossible for us to let those people go.
- drawkward 2y agoIt would be terrible for businesses to fire people arbitrarily. I'd rather give more rights to individuals than to businesses, because I am biased in an anti-business way: businesses arent bounded by human lifespans or biological constraints, get preferential treatment by the American legal system, have orders of magnitude more money and political power than individuals. It's almost like the USA fought a war and chartered individual rights in a document over this kind of shit, but never imagined businesses would be more encompassing than governments.
- VWWHFSfQ 2y agoOff-shoring is already very prevalent in US tech work. So there certainly needs to be a balance in workers rights and business interest if those jobs are going to stay domestic. In general I agree with your perspective. But there is a harsh alternative reality that we're going to continue to face in the tech workforce.
- 9x39 2y agoWould it be terrible if employees could fire their employers arbitrarily? Both parties have freedom in this arrangement, but we can find examples of both employees and employers with weak negotiating positions. I don't think that invalidates the benefits of freedoms of association. To your point about business being bound by constraints, they absolutely are bound by the niche they operate in. As markets change, world events unfold, competitors appear, decisions are made, companies can struggle and fail, yet are typically unable to pivot. Consider a company that makes ICE cars that can't follow the market into making EVs. Or a company that has never had competition might be in the stranglehold of "this is the way we've always done it" when a fierce competitor emerges, and won't adapt. True, most employees typically don't have equity (so they don't share in all the upside), but they also aren't married to the company when it looks like a supertanker headed for an inevitable collision with a bridge (getting wiped out on the downside).
- drawkward 2y ago>Would it be terrible if employees could fire their employers arbitrarily? Yes.
- aguaviva 2y agoIt would be terrible if it was impossible for us to let those people go. About half the people on this thread seem to be misreading that sentence. It's very clear that "just cause" includes cases of low performance. So no, it's not about making it impossible to fire these people.
- BehindBlueEyes 2y agoalso isn't that why trial periods exist? as in you have 3 month or so to change your mind after hiring someone/taking a job if it turns out to be a bad fit, for whatever reason, at either employer or employees initiative?
- mediaman 2y agoHiring consistently high performing employees is not a solved problem. Making it hard to fire low performers results in low performing teams, and there are no reliable solutions to this.
- drawkward 2y agoOne wonders if it is not solved simply because of at will employlemt? Almost like firms are lazy, and unwilling to go beyond the bare minumum required by law.
- FirmwareBurner 2y agoThere's nothing stopping someone from performing well at interviews then stop performing once they get hired and have the job secured.
- drawkward 2y agoMoral obligations, a sense of pride in ones work, ethical worldview...thats just off the top of my head. It seems if the problem you allege were true at scale, the entire labor force is sitting around doing nothing. Are you really claiming that the only reason all (tech) employees do their job is just to avoid firing? How do you operate in a zero-trust life?
- FirmwareBurner 2y ago[flagged]
- kjksf 2y agoIf you ever went through interview loop at Google or a similar company, I doubt you would call those companies "lazy" wrt. hiring. An interview is at least 4 people, each grilling you for an hour, asking hard questions. Their hiring bar is high and they optimize for avoiding bad hires (which of course is pissing off the commenters who want to be hired and therefore would prefer lower hiring standard). In Europe they make it harder to fire people and guess what happened? First, companies have probatory period (2-6 months, depending on the country) where you're hired but can be fired at will. This is to minimize chances of being stuck with a poor performer. Second, EU economy is about the size of US and China but software industry (and the tax / employment riches associated with it) is largely in US Chine. Might be a coincidence but I think there's causality between over-regulation and stagnation of the economy.
- cool_dude85 2y agoWho your boss says is "low-performing" may not match your own experience of who is "low-performing", and may include e.g. people who the boss doesn't personally like, or indeed may include you yourself.
- lucianbr 2y agoAs if only low-performing coworkers would be terminated. The total freedom of the company to terminate anyone any time for any reason or no reason is extreme, and now we are pivoting to the other extreme. Funny how that happens.
- cool_dude85 2y ago"Just cause" provisions are about an inch away from arbitrary termination, they are hardly "the other extreme."
- lucianbr 2y agoThat's really nice if that is the case. My understanding from the comments was that this prevents people who don't do their job from being fired, as long as they don't set fire to the servers or something. If I misunderstood, then the union is being nicer than they have to.
- drawkward 2y agoIn my experience, the commenters here, on a forum for SV startups, are overwhelmingly biased in favor of business.
- FirmwareBurner 2y agoWhy wouldn't it be? Businesses doing pro-business things are the main reason well paying jobs exist. And people love well paying jobs rather than poor paying jobs.
- drawkward 2y agoI am making no claim about what the comment bias should be here on HN. I am merely reporting it to the parent comment.
- miltonlost 2y ago
- shadowgovt 2y agoAges ago, I spoke with someone who had experience doing union organizing in the steel industry about why tech workers didn't unionize. I told him that the first step would be for tech workers to stop thinking that their greatest competition is other tech workers. (Flip the question: "If your coworkers are low-performing but the union prevents the company from firing them, why don't you just go form your own company with your three closest buddies and compete? That's the dream, right?")
- CrimsonRain 2y agoHow about you open a new company with your low performing buddies and form union with them elsewhere? Fields where skill disparity is extreme, only low performing leeches or lazy ones want union so they can leech off of colleagues who do real work.
- shadowgovt 2y agoGiven that over half of startups fail, I believe the case could be made that people do what you've described all the time.
- Eumenes 2y ago[flagged]
- code_for_monkey 2y agothis is just racism
- aliasxneo 2y agoInterestingly, this comment can be interpreted both ways. The act of pushing people through a lower barrier based on their race can be inferred as racist, or the claim that such a thing is happening can also be inferred as racist. I spent eight years at Google, starting long before these DEI mandates came in (and did over a hundred interviews during that period). I think the person you're responding to is being sensationalist, but I also feel the way these measures were rolled out did end up missing out on a lot of great hires due to them not fitting the perceived makeup of the company. Funnily enough, I recall a specific meeting where they were planning to roll out measures to equalize pay between male and females. Prior to the rollout, they did an internal audit to understand the extent of the problem, and the audit came back highly favoring females over males. To Google's credit, they didn't move forward with it.
- Eumenes 2y ago[flagged]
- adrianstoll 2y ago> You rarely knew if the people you interviewed were hired or not Perhaps this has changed over the years. I recall there is a website listing all the people you have interviewed and their status (e.g. upcoming interview, rejected, application withdrawn etc)
- anonfordays 2y ago/r/SelfAwareWolves-tier comment.
- Timon3 2y agoLow performance is an example of just cause. The employer simply has to prove that this was the case, and that they gave the employee notice, a chance to improve, and a reasonable standard to reach.
- ta1243 2y agoProblem is that require the employer to define what an acceptable level of performance is, and that's notoriously difficult So instead the choices tend to drift to "fire them on the manager's whim" or "practically impossible to get rid of short of murder"
- willsmith72 2y agoWho says it's notoriously difficult? I've worked many places with clear processes for identifying and resolving poor performance issues (firing being one possible resolution). That sounds like just your experience
- ta1243 2y agoIt's massively common, factors into the whole office/home debates that have been raging for 4 years https://www.apqc.org/blog/better-measurement-knowledge-worker-pickle https://www.apqc.org/blog/better-measurement-knowledge-worke... The crux of growth in knowledge workers is that our current norms of measurement and productivity were developed in a manufacturing or manual task-oriented mindset. According to Peter Drucker, productivity for knowledge workers needs a different set of considerations https://www.cipd.org/globalassets/media/knowledge/knowledge-hub/factsheets/8296-knowledge-work-practice-summary.pdf https://www.cipd.org/globalassets/media/knowledge/knowledge-... While in manual work the targets and outputs are usually clear, knowledge work and its results are less tangible, and therefore harder to define, measure and evaluate https://trepo.tuni.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/114586/palvalin_47.pdf?sequence=1 https://trepo.tuni.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/114586/palvalin... Drucker (1999) has even stated that knowledge worker productivity is the biggest challenge for modern work life. Other researchers have also discovered that the performance of an individual knowledge worker is the most important factor for organisational success... The need for general performance measurement is great as the theme is still quite new and there are very few previous studies measuring the effectiveness of NewWoW practices. There is also a need for practical tools for analysing and managing the performance of knowledge work from the NewWoW perspective. Organisations are still planning and making NewWoW changes, without clear evidence of their benefits and without any measurement information
- code_for_monkey 2y agowhy are tech workers, my industry, so committed to this ideology? Do you think the tech layoffs of the last few years was a justified culling of lazy idiots?
- asdasdsddd 2y agoyes mostly, i worked with many lazy idiots, who undeservedly made millions while our clients and customers suffered
- anon84873628 2y agoThat's not how it went for us. I would have chosen a very different set of people to sack. Unfortunately I think those types of layoffs are separate from "firing" and probably not covered by these terms.
- code_for_monkey 2y agowhat do you think their opinions of you were?
- asdasdsddd 2y agoa junior who was dumb enough to actually do work
- repeekad 2y agoI think almost by definition a layoff is to remove redundant/bottom performers to keep the machine clean and lean, that’s capitalism for ya
- mmooss 2y agoThe reason given is usually to cut costs, because the company claims to lack the cashflow or income to pay them. If the company can't afford it or doesn't believe they need it, they cut meat and bone and not just fat. Look at the news organizations laying off reporters in large numbers. The news organizations' product suffers considerably.
- quandrum 2y agoNo, I want management to develop a system to determine who is low-performing, document when those workers don't meet the standards of performance, and reference those documents when they fire someone. It's just asking for due process.
- Vaslo 2y agoDue process from a union definition is often ridiculous and protects the members beyond what a reasonable customer/employer should expect.
- throw4847285 2y agoAmazing. That's what negotiating is for. The union gives the maximal version of what they want, the bosses counter, everybody celebrates the results.
- stogot 2y agoWhat makes you think they don’t have that?
- cmptrnerd6 2y agoI have never seen such a system that I thought worked or wasn't just gamed into uselessness. Do you have any examples of systems that worked well?
- diffeomorphism 2y agoThat would be weird, so it is obviously not the case. That is because you are quoting only half of the (excerpt of the) point.
- bcdtttt 2y ago[dead]
- whalesalad 2y ago[flagged]
- lallysingh 2y agoWho wrote the article? What's their interest in the issue?
- legitster 2y agoIt's particularly an awful request to pair with remote work. "I should be able to work anywhere so long as it doesn't affect my performance..." "Also don't judge me based on performance". I think people need to be honest that WFH is as an argument is tightly integrated with merit.
- eloisant 2y agoI don't see the link. Does working in office means you're allowed to do a crappy job?
- legitster 2y agoI mean, in the context of most union agreements with a similar provision, kinda. Your union might protect you from termination on an assembly line, and at least they can move you around the facility or bring in extra workers. Or for a teacher they bring in more supervision and resources. In contexts where unions have similar provisions, direct supervision is implied.
- RobRivera 2y agoBc management never abuses the optics to force out people that they dont like, vs someone productive, ever.
- WalterBright 2y agoUsually they don't like someone because they are poor performers. As a person who has owned a business with employees, you naturally like the ones that are making you money. In fact, I'd put up with a whole lot of things I don't like if they make money for me. As a manager, I'd naturally want to retain the people who made me look good to my manager, regardless of my personal feelings. Having a personal vendetta against particular employees has never happened in my experience, though it's been alleged a lot.
- hanniabu 2y agoAnd the alternative is a lower barrier for abuse
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kergonath 2y agoPersonally, I prefer having a few low-performing people around than being in a state of existential threat of being fired for no reason by a middle manager. They are easier to work around. Anyway, no, that is not what they want.
- feedforward 2y agoWhen the wealth created by those who work at the New York Times is sent out in dividends to those who do no work or create wealth there, what is performance of these rentiers? You're arguing on the side of the rentiers and parasites who do not work, and lecturing about "low performance". It's the people doing the work's purview to discuss performance, not the parasites.
- ff317 2y agoWhy were those "rentiers and parasites" ever involved? Why wasn't the NYT (or any other Thing) just created by the workers without their involvement? The answer in practice is that they provided value by providing the necessary capital to build the thing, and they did so in return for a cut of the future wealth earned by the thing. It's arguable that the wealth inequality that set the initial conditions for this is out of hand, but given the starting conditions, how else do you make big things?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- School-Cotton 2y agoNothing forces you to go work for those so-called “parasites” if you don’t want to. You are perfectly allowed to start your own worker-owned journalism collective if that’s what you prefer.
- lc9er 2y agoMost of the anti-union tech workers I've encountered over my career have vastly overestimated their abilities and value to the workforce. Their willingness to suffer abuse from employers (while taking pride in their refusal to establish boundaries) makes working conditions worse for all of us.
- bradlys 2y agoThe most aggressive I've seen advocating against unions are not ICs anymore and often are a part of management/capital.
- HDThoreaun 2y agoMost of the pro-union tech workers I know have never been forced to join a corrupt union that does nothing to help them while keeping the good old boys who contribute little to the company employed. Many tech workers are paid in stock so theres tons of incentive to get rid of low performers.
- anon84873628 2y agoSounds like a best of both worlds scenario. The overconfident tech bros can get to work "disrupting" unions and re-learning the same lessons.
- mavelikara 2y agoSomeone could be pro-union and still not support that clause.
- eikenberry 2y agoIf the alternative is to be under constant existential threat of being laid off... I could see is as the lesser evil. IMO, recent events are the reason for this item being included.
- WalterBright 2y agoA sensible person would not have their finances stretched so thin that they cannot deal with an interruption in their employment. I.e. one should be setting aside at least 10% of their income. I worked for a company once that was doing poorly, and management decided to do an across-the-board 10% pay cut. One of my coworkers was livid with rage. I asked him why didn't he just quit and get another job? He said he didn't have any savings at all, and bills to pay. He had a mcmansion with expensive new furniture, new cars for himself and his wife, and expensive clothes. He had forged the chain connecting him to his desk - not the company's fault.
- eikenberry 2y agoSavings don't protect you from the stress unless you've saved enough to retire. Savings provides a buffer of time you get to find another job, but you still have to find (and land) that job. Given how f'd-up tech hiring is and the current job market that might not be as easy as it sounds... So I can understand why people want to avoid that level of stress and the compromises they will make to do that.
- WalterBright 2y agoHaving savings to give you a buffer of time is much less stressful than no savings.
- eikenberry 2y agoNo doubt it is way less stressful... going from "I'm going to need to have an accident so my family can live off my life insurance" to "I need to see a doctor about all this ulcer". But you'd still rather not have the ulcer.
- sensanaty 2y agoI hear a lot of anti-worker propaganda like this and it baffles me. I live in the Netherlands where these types of worker protections are enshrined in law, and I don't think I've ever encountered this boogeyman of the super low performing coworker that somehow ruins things for everyone else. News flash, low performance is still a valid reason for dismissal, it just has to actually be backed up by proof rather than being done on a whim because some manager has a vendetta. Also, I don't give a shit how low performance my colleagues are as long as the useless managerial class exists. The laziest and most worthless people I've ever interacted with were always managers or manager-adjacent, never a regular employee.
- strix_varius 2y agoAs a sometimes-engineer, sometimes-manager in mostly multinational tech, this doesn't reflect my experience at all. I've worked with plenty of low performing ICs (as both peer and manager), and the trends are clear: * companies that don't do, or don't do sufficient, technical interviewing * employees with heavy worker protections, like in Germany. I've also worked with fantastic German colleagues btw. But one reason they tended to get paid so much less is that they came with much, much higher risk, as they were essentially un-fireable. Even with imminently clear under performance you're looking at a year of PIPs, paperwork, and CYA bureaucracy. Personally, I've found it more fulfilling to work in at-will places, for much higher wages, with more uniformly excellent colleagues. There's a reason so many of the best software engineers in the world make their way to the US.
- throwaway2037 2y agoTo be clear, in many countries with stronger labour laws, "just cause" employment is the national standard -- a requirement. As I understand, the US has many laws that protect again discrimination (hiring and firing), but very few laws that protect all workers from arbitrary layoffs. (Companies can hire and fire as they please with very few severance requirements.) In practice, when you want to layoff low performing workers in places with stronger labour laws, you need to offer large enough severance for them to voluntarily resign. Depending on the country, culture, seniority, and industry, this can be anywhere from 3 to 24 months. Yes, there is a huge variance. One thing that I don't see being discussed here: If you add "just cause" to your employment contract, you are pretty much trading away future pay raises for security. That is fine, but it needs to be said out loud. Lastly: I never heard the term "just cause" before this HN discussion. It sounds like a US-specific term. I learned more about it on Wiki here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_cause_(employment_law) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_cause_(employment_law)
- morgante 2y ago> This is such a weird request for technology workers. You want to work with low-performing coworkers? A ton of tech workers are, in fact, socialists who think job expectations should be 0.