5 ms·

As a consultant rather than an employee, and someone who takes a similar attitude to employment, I totally get where the author is coming from. Employment is a

As a consultant rather than an employee, and someone who takes a similar attitude to employment, I totally get where the author is coming from. Employment is a transaction of money for work, not a marriage. I'll get annoyed is my hypothetical wife leaves me when my skills atrophy, but I'm not going to act butthurt just because my employer no longer needs a data scientits. Additionally, it sounds like the employee was treated well. "eventually we agreed to terminate our collaboration as soon as he would have found a new challenge." Maybe I'm misinterpreting the corporatespeak, but that sounds like a "start looking for something, we'll pay you until you find it." Not a bad deal at all. And it sounds like the employee was still employed (albeit being paid to look for new work) at the time this occurred.

collyw 13y ago
As a consultant you must see far higher hourly rates than a normal permanent employee.
- yummyfajitas 13y ago
  I'm not arguing that employment or contracting is better - I think that markets are efficient and they are roughly equal deals. I'm asking why employees often don't take the same attitude about it, albeit with a different set of expectations/tradeoffs. I.e., I had a client about 6 months ago who got rid of me when he no longer needed help with $STOCK_MARKET_STUFF. Then he needed more $STOCK_MARKET_STUFF done recently - I wasn't "unmotivated" as a result of him terminating our relationship previously.
  - ZenPro 13y ago
    Did the additional $STOCK_MARKET_STUFF require you doing it for free and for the 'passion'?
  - jackvalentine 13y ago
    1) The notice given was required by law, not some kind of sweetheart deal for the employee. 2) It appears that after-hours on-call work wasn't ever actually a part of the employee's contract - they shouldn't have been doing them anyway. When you know you're no-longer part of the team, why exactly would you go above and beyond? Show up, do good work in the hours you're contracted for and don't pick up the phone after hours. The employee is treating it as a time:money transaction and since there is no ongoing deal why give away your time for free?
    - yummyfajitas 13y ago
      I don't see the relevance of (1). As for (2), I missed it on my first reading. Regarding (2), I see two ways to interpret it. One is that the CEO was asking for a bunch of "above-and-beyond" work. The other is that there was an implicit agreement for such work, but Belgian law made it impossible to explicitly contract for. In the former case I have no problem with the employee, in the latter case he sounds like a pain to work with. And make no mistake, there is an implicit contract at nearly all jobs. Typical clauses might be "CTO filters BS from above so developers can do real work" or "go ahead and take reasonable flex-time in spite of what the official policy is, but be available for crunch time". Even in a flexible place like the US, it's simply logistically impossible to encode everything in a contract. The closest anyone has come to it are union work rules, disaster that they are. What "find an employee with passion" really means is "find an employee who's attitude fits better with the implicit contract".
      - jackvalentine 13y ago
        > The other is that there was an implicit agreement for such work, but Belgian law made it impossible to explicitly contract for. Considering Google has a datacentre in Belgian that presumably has 24/7 availability, I find this hard to believe. I presume Belgian has security guards, nightfill and a fire brigade also. > What "find an employee with passion" really means is "find an employee who's attitude fits better with the implicit contract". I read this as "find an employee who is too scared, too naieve or too stupid to enforce the explicit contract they signed". If you want someone to do the work, you need to contract it. Anything else is abusive management. The relevance of 1) is responding to this in your original post: "Additionally, it sounds like the employee was treated well." If Belgian law required say, two weeks notice and the CEO gave the guy 12 weeks I'd be more forgiving of her, but if the bare minimum of law is being implemented then she deserves nothing extra in return.
      - mrow84 13y ago
        That one enters into implicit contracts is undoubtedly correct, however I would question the duration of that contract. Firstly, the benefit relationship of all contracts, implicit or otherwise, is asymmetric: the benefits accrued to the employer will be greater than those accrued to the employees: to do otherwise would erode profits, and put the company out of business. Some companies have 'enlightened' opinions about how to extract good work from their employees, but it is still done with the goal of being more profitable. Arguing from the poor practices of other companies is not constructive. With respect to the particular situation, once the employee had been placed on notice, it seems to me that the implicit contract was broken, unless the employer was just as willing as they were beforehand to offer the 'implicit benefits' to the employee, which seems unlikely. Indeed, the situation really seems to be that the employer is asking for all the benefits on their side of the implicit contract, without offering anything in return. Finally, for me the implicit contract is not really between the employee and the employer, but between the employee and their coworkers. Whenever I have gone above and beyond, I haven't been doing it for the company, but for the people I work with. However, my experiences are limited to medium sized companies, so things might be different in smaller environments.
  - pbhjpbhj 13y ago
    I think the employee's situation is more akin with you pitching for a job with a client you've worked with for a long time. The client decides to go with someone else, that goes badly and so they call you out of normal office hours asking you to drop everything and help fix the situation they've fallen in to by not hiring you (for the further work). Not only that but they're not going to pay you as you're already working on the old job for them. Now you might still be motivated in thinking that they'll employ you for future contracts; but if you're not a contract worker that motivation doesn't really work out.
  - 6d0debc071 13y ago
    One of the implicit parts of having an employer is that you're signing on for a certain degree of stability - you're both invested in the long term of the relationship. And that stability is reflected in your lower wage than a contract worker would exact for the same service. If that's not going to be the case, then trade offs that someone might make to invest in that long term relationship cease to make sense.
sgift 13y ago
That "deal" to give him reasonable time to find a new job was forced by law, not given by kindness of her heart. And where exactly did you get the impression that the employee was "butthurt"? The employee noted exactly what you said: A job is a transaction of money for work, not a marriage, so: Do what is written in the contract. Not more, not less. She didn't like that.
- crusso 13y ago
  That "deal" to give him reasonable time to find a new job was forced by law, not given by kindness of her heart. If she wanted to do the minimum declared by law, she would have just fired him. The severance clock doesn't start ticking until you fire someone. By just coming to an agreement with him that he would look for a job, she was giving him extra time. If she decided after a month that he wasn't getting a new job and wanted to let him go, then at that point, she'd still owe him the minimal amount of severance. [edit: You can tell that this issue is all about emotion when a simple fact like what I stated above has to be downvoted]
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - Karunamon 13y ago
    That's just it - under Belgian law, there is effectively no difference between "You're fired" and "Let's agree to move on in 3 months" - they are the same thing because the law requires the latter. You can couch it in all the touchy-feely-corporate-PR speak you want, but a firing is a firing.
crusso 13y ago
I'm increasingly stunned at the lack of empathy for what it's like to be an employer here on HN where, ostensibly, people are trying to learn about what it takes to become a successful startup and employer. As an employer, I've dealt with helping people transition out of a job that has disappeared or turned out not to be right for them. I tried to do what this woman did - give the employee some extra time on my dime to find new work. If during that time that I'm paying them to hunt for a job (which costs me thousands of dollars a week, typically), if I need them to lift a finger to do something, I should feel guilty to even ask? If I took the flip side of the attitude of a lot of people in this thread, I'd just fire an employee with minimal severance the moment he isn't making me money. That would suck.
- wigsgiw 13y ago
  As an employer, I'd consider it out of line to ask an employee to help in a crisis out of hours, unpaid. More so if they'd been effectively fired weeks before. As noted, the time to find other work isn't out of the goodness of her heart; it's the law in Belgium. Employees giving their time for a panic, outside of their normal hours, is a privilege earned by employers through treating people right. Expecting those who've been shown the door to do so is twisted.
- wazoox 13y ago
  As an employer myself, I'm stunned at your lack of understanding of how unequal, unbalanced the employer/employee relationship is. As an employer whatever you do, you'll oppress your employees. There's no way around it. Don't try icing the shitcake and pretend the system doesn't suck; that's not about you, but the role you're assuming. That doesn't preclude you from being a decent human being and provide your employee extra time to look for another work. This is just however basic decency, not great generosity on your part.
rmc 13y ago
Sure, employment is money in exchange for some time. But if you only pay for (say) 40 hours a week, the employee isn't required to give you any more. Sounds like the employer expected more than what they were paying for, and the employee didn't want to give the work away for free anymore. A true capitalist would say that the employer was being stupid.
jasonkester 13y ago
Just upvoted in an attempt to un-grey you. Both because your comment wasn't out of place here, and because it was correct. This is my preferred version of "work" as well. I tend to negotiate all my engagements as 1099 contracts specifically so that neither me nor the employer need to feel bad when things end. Assuming you're capable of saving money and finding your own health insurance, it's really the best arrangement you can have. Need me to work overtime for a couple weeks because it's "crunch time". No worries, and no hard feelings because you're paying me for those extra hours. 18" of fresh powder in the mountains overnight? Nice! You'll find my next invoice with six fewer hours on it. It's really the most equitable arrangement you can have with an employer. We're both businessmen, trading services for payment. When it's time to part ways, we wish each other well, make non-binding references to maybe working together again some day, and head our separate directions with no hard feelings.
nmrm 13y ago
The crucial factor here is that the CEO wanted him to be available for support outside of working hours, beyond the scope of his contract. In fact, beyond the scope of any legal Belgian employment contract! Your argument seems to be that since the employer is giving him time to find a new job, the employee should work beyond the scope of his contract. I don't think this holds up. First of all, I doubt this is 100% altruism. Destroying morale in a start-up can destroy the company. But even if it is completely altruistic, altruism on the part of the employer doesn't need to be reciprocated. (edit: added the two paragraph above before parent's reply, I think?) After all, "Employment is a transaction of money for work, not a marriage". (fwiw, you shouldn't have been downvoted.)
- yummyfajitas 13y ago
  See my response to jackvalentine. If available outside of working hours was part of the implicit contract and expectations of work, the employee is being a dick. If not, the CEO was. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7639711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7639711
  - jackvalentine 13y ago
    Why do you think an implicit employment contract is acceptable or even enforcable? There is a reason job descriptions, employment contracts and labour laws exist: to stop abuse by heavily "implied" duties. If you want someone to do some work, make that explicit.
  - nmrm 13y ago
    Perhaps. But being "on call" 24/7 to deal with emergency situations should not never be an implicit expectation.
  - ctdonath 13y ago
    She made it clear "outside work hours" was not contracted, that she expected it as a matter of enthusiasm and personal character - right at the time when she had ended all cause for enthusiasm, and personal character was reasonably focused on long-term survival elsewhere.

collyw 13y ago

As a consultant you must see far higher hourly rates than a normal permanent employee.

yummyfajitas 13y ago
I'm not arguing that employment or contracting is better - I think that markets are efficient and they are roughly equal deals. I'm asking why employees often don't take the same attitude about it, albeit with a different set of expectations/tradeoffs. I.e., I had a client about 6 months ago who got rid of me when he no longer needed help with $STOCK_MARKET_STUFF. Then he needed more $STOCK_MARKET_STUFF done recently - I wasn't "unmotivated" as a result of him terminating our relationship previously.
- ZenPro 13y ago
  Did the additional $STOCK_MARKET_STUFF require you doing it for free and for the 'passion'?
- jackvalentine 13y ago
  1) The notice given was required by law, not some kind of sweetheart deal for the employee. 2) It appears that after-hours on-call work wasn't ever actually a part of the employee's contract - they shouldn't have been doing them anyway. When you know you're no-longer part of the team, why exactly would you go above and beyond? Show up, do good work in the hours you're contracted for and don't pick up the phone after hours. The employee is treating it as a time:money transaction and since there is no ongoing deal why give away your time for free?
  - yummyfajitas 13y ago
    I don't see the relevance of (1). As for (2), I missed it on my first reading. Regarding (2), I see two ways to interpret it. One is that the CEO was asking for a bunch of "above-and-beyond" work. The other is that there was an implicit agreement for such work, but Belgian law made it impossible to explicitly contract for. In the former case I have no problem with the employee, in the latter case he sounds like a pain to work with. And make no mistake, there is an implicit contract at nearly all jobs. Typical clauses might be "CTO filters BS from above so developers can do real work" or "go ahead and take reasonable flex-time in spite of what the official policy is, but be available for crunch time". Even in a flexible place like the US, it's simply logistically impossible to encode everything in a contract. The closest anyone has come to it are union work rules, disaster that they are. What "find an employee with passion" really means is "find an employee who's attitude fits better with the implicit contract".
    - jackvalentine 13y ago
      > The other is that there was an implicit agreement for such work, but Belgian law made it impossible to explicitly contract for. Considering Google has a datacentre in Belgian that presumably has 24/7 availability, I find this hard to believe. I presume Belgian has security guards, nightfill and a fire brigade also. > What "find an employee with passion" really means is "find an employee who's attitude fits better with the implicit contract". I read this as "find an employee who is too scared, too naieve or too stupid to enforce the explicit contract they signed". If you want someone to do the work, you need to contract it. Anything else is abusive management. The relevance of 1) is responding to this in your original post: "Additionally, it sounds like the employee was treated well." If Belgian law required say, two weeks notice and the CEO gave the guy 12 weeks I'd be more forgiving of her, but if the bare minimum of law is being implemented then she deserves nothing extra in return.
    - mrow84 13y ago
      That one enters into implicit contracts is undoubtedly correct, however I would question the duration of that contract. Firstly, the benefit relationship of all contracts, implicit or otherwise, is asymmetric: the benefits accrued to the employer will be greater than those accrued to the employees: to do otherwise would erode profits, and put the company out of business. Some companies have 'enlightened' opinions about how to extract good work from their employees, but it is still done with the goal of being more profitable. Arguing from the poor practices of other companies is not constructive. With respect to the particular situation, once the employee had been placed on notice, it seems to me that the implicit contract was broken, unless the employer was just as willing as they were beforehand to offer the 'implicit benefits' to the employee, which seems unlikely. Indeed, the situation really seems to be that the employer is asking for all the benefits on their side of the implicit contract, without offering anything in return. Finally, for me the implicit contract is not really between the employee and the employer, but between the employee and their coworkers. Whenever I have gone above and beyond, I haven't been doing it for the company, but for the people I work with. However, my experiences are limited to medium sized companies, so things might be different in smaller environments.
- pbhjpbhj 13y ago
  I think the employee's situation is more akin with you pitching for a job with a client you've worked with for a long time. The client decides to go with someone else, that goes badly and so they call you out of normal office hours asking you to drop everything and help fix the situation they've fallen in to by not hiring you (for the further work). Not only that but they're not going to pay you as you're already working on the old job for them. Now you might still be motivated in thinking that they'll employ you for future contracts; but if you're not a contract worker that motivation doesn't really work out.
- 6d0debc071 13y ago
  One of the implicit parts of having an employer is that you're signing on for a certain degree of stability - you're both invested in the long term of the relationship. And that stability is reflected in your lower wage than a contract worker would exact for the same service. If that's not going to be the case, then trade offs that someone might make to invest in that long term relationship cease to make sense.

sgift 13y ago

That "deal" to give him reasonable time to find a new job was forced by law, not given by kindness of her heart. And where exactly did you get the impression that the employee was "butthurt"? The employee noted exactly what you said: A job is a transaction of money for work, not a marriage, so: Do what is written in the contract. Not more, not less. She didn't like that.

crusso 13y ago
That "deal" to give him reasonable time to find a new job was forced by law, not given by kindness of her heart. If she wanted to do the minimum declared by law, she would have just fired him. The severance clock doesn't start ticking until you fire someone. By just coming to an agreement with him that he would look for a job, she was giving him extra time. If she decided after a month that he wasn't getting a new job and wanted to let him go, then at that point, she'd still owe him the minimal amount of severance. [edit: You can tell that this issue is all about emotion when a simple fact like what I stated above has to be downvoted]
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- Karunamon 13y ago
  That's just it - under Belgian law, there is effectively no difference between "You're fired" and "Let's agree to move on in 3 months" - they are the same thing because the law requires the latter. You can couch it in all the touchy-feely-corporate-PR speak you want, but a firing is a firing.

crusso 13y ago

I'm increasingly stunned at the lack of empathy for what it's like to be an employer here on HN where, ostensibly, people are trying to learn about what it takes to become a successful startup and employer. As an employer, I've dealt with helping people transition out of a job that has disappeared or turned out not to be right for them. I tried to do what this woman did - give the employee some extra time on my dime to find new work. If during that time that I'm paying them to hunt for a job (which costs me thousands of dollars a week, typically), if I need them to lift a finger to do something, I should feel guilty to even ask? If I took the flip side of the attitude of a lot of people in this thread, I'd just fire an employee with minimal severance the moment he isn't making me money. That would suck.

wigsgiw 13y ago
As an employer, I'd consider it out of line to ask an employee to help in a crisis out of hours, unpaid. More so if they'd been effectively fired weeks before. As noted, the time to find other work isn't out of the goodness of her heart; it's the law in Belgium. Employees giving their time for a panic, outside of their normal hours, is a privilege earned by employers through treating people right. Expecting those who've been shown the door to do so is twisted.
wazoox 13y ago
As an employer myself, I'm stunned at your lack of understanding of how unequal, unbalanced the employer/employee relationship is. As an employer whatever you do, you'll oppress your employees. There's no way around it. Don't try icing the shitcake and pretend the system doesn't suck; that's not about you, but the role you're assuming. That doesn't preclude you from being a decent human being and provide your employee extra time to look for another work. This is just however basic decency, not great generosity on your part.

rmc 13y ago

Sure, employment is money in exchange for some time. But if you only pay for (say) 40 hours a week, the employee isn't required to give you any more. Sounds like the employer expected more than what they were paying for, and the employee didn't want to give the work away for free anymore. A true capitalist would say that the employer was being stupid.

jasonkester 13y ago

Just upvoted in an attempt to un-grey you. Both because your comment wasn't out of place here, and because it was correct. This is my preferred version of "work" as well. I tend to negotiate all my engagements as 1099 contracts specifically so that neither me nor the employer need to feel bad when things end. Assuming you're capable of saving money and finding your own health insurance, it's really the best arrangement you can have. Need me to work overtime for a couple weeks because it's "crunch time". No worries, and no hard feelings because you're paying me for those extra hours. 18" of fresh powder in the mountains overnight? Nice! You'll find my next invoice with six fewer hours on it. It's really the most equitable arrangement you can have with an employer. We're both businessmen, trading services for payment. When it's time to part ways, we wish each other well, make non-binding references to maybe working together again some day, and head our separate directions with no hard feelings.

nmrm 13y ago

The crucial factor here is that the CEO wanted him to be available for support outside of working hours, beyond the scope of his contract. In fact, beyond the scope of any legal Belgian employment contract! Your argument seems to be that since the employer is giving him time to find a new job, the employee should work beyond the scope of his contract. I don't think this holds up. First of all, I doubt this is 100% altruism. Destroying morale in a start-up can destroy the company. But even if it is completely altruistic, altruism on the part of the employer doesn't need to be reciprocated. (edit: added the two paragraph above before parent's reply, I think?) After all, "Employment is a transaction of money for work, not a marriage". (fwiw, you shouldn't have been downvoted.)

yummyfajitas 13y ago
See my response to jackvalentine. If available outside of working hours was part of the implicit contract and expectations of work, the employee is being a dick. If not, the CEO was. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7639711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7639711
- jackvalentine 13y ago
  Why do you think an implicit employment contract is acceptable or even enforcable? There is a reason job descriptions, employment contracts and labour laws exist: to stop abuse by heavily "implied" duties. If you want someone to do some work, make that explicit.
- nmrm 13y ago
  Perhaps. But being "on call" 24/7 to deal with emergency situations should not never be an implicit expectation.
- ctdonath 13y ago
  She made it clear "outside work hours" was not contracted, that she expected it as a matter of enthusiasm and personal character - right at the time when she had ended all cause for enthusiasm, and personal character was reasonably focused on long-term survival elsewhere.