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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

It's not always easy or possible to have redundancy for every role. At a company with 20 devs, hiring 2pms, 2 data scientists and 2 DBA just to handle vacation coverage is not realistic. At MS or FB this makes sense, but lots of places are much smaller.

Sometimes the best business decision is not the most convenient one for the employees - life is full of tradeoffs.

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It doesn't have to be 1:1 personal redundancy -- it's more like, several of the 20 devs being able to assume lightweight PM/DS/DBA responsibilities for a few weeks while that person is away (I've personally as a dev covered for pretty much that set of roles -- and always had a renewed appreciation for the skills of that person when they returned). In other words, don't silo your roles too rigidly, especially when you're small and can't afford 1:1 redundancies.

And if your company absolutely 100% relies on having a full-blown PM/DS/DBA around at all times, well, then you DO need (at least) two of each, otherwise your company tanks if your one DBA gets sick or leaves for a company where they don't have to suffer the permanent stress of being a SPOF.

And if you CAN survive for a few weeks while you hire and train a new DBA in that situation, then you can survive for a few weeks while your DBA is on holiday.

But you're also a country with mostly "at will" employment laws - any one of those employees can quit with no notice. If you can't cope for a week without any of those individuals then you have some serious business risks.

Except "coping" isn't what everyone thinks about, there's some bizarre expectation of 100% efficiency for short notice things. If the DBA needs a week off then plan around it. I can see a case in a small firm for some people to be contactable in case of dire emergencies - but with significant costs like holiday day reimbursement and cash if activated. Not an expectation of any contact, view that as a significant failing.

Many small companies are stuck with serious business risks, such as critical people leaving. Their goal is to grow fast enough to work around those risks.

Some will die due to those risks. Most likely the right way to mitigate those risks is not European style work/life balance but rather Valley style "pay the SPOF a lot, give him ownership, and make him feel highly valued".

Well there might be sufficient data to bear that out. Plenty of startups are adopting work / life balance friendly policies. It would be interesting to see if they have a better / worse change of success... Perhaps one for Mattermark

Sometimes the best business decision is not the most convenient one for the employees - life is full of tradeoffs.

That's very true, and sometimes the best business decision is one that favours staff retention over short term profit. Losing the experience and expertise of someone who's been in the company a while just because you can't manage your team well enough to get people trained to cover one another's vacation time is going to get expensive when people burn out and quit, not to mention the effect it'll have on staff morale and your business's reputation as a bad place to work (which has a knock-on effect on sales).

You're entirely right that a small business can't afford to have complete redundancy for every staff position - the appropriate strategy is to put well documented processes in place, with good handover management and proper knowledge sharing. Discouraging people from taking vacation time to the point where you'd only hire in countries where you can give your staff zero paid vacation days is not.

Is it really a good business decision if loosing one of your employees could send ripples through your products and negatively affect it for months to come?

So, how do you handle this in a country, in which you're legally obliged to provide vacation to your employees?

Just flout the law?

It's less of an issue where people take their vacations at the same time (eg 4 weeks summer, 1 week christmas, etc). Then you just need a skeleton crew, no PMs and your CTO & other founders can be on-call for ops emergencies. As your company grows so that you no longer have technically competent management you start having 2 PMs and 2 DBAs too :)

I'd just avoid hiring in such countries. India and the US have lots of great developers. I don't see a reason why I'd ever hire devs in Europe.

... so you just hire developers in the United States then? (India has a mandatory vacation policy, or so appears to say Wikipedia...)

Employment laws in India more or less apply only to either larger companies or friends of connected people.

I would have no concerns hiring someone and telling them "hey, I'm paying you well because I need you available all the time, just in case." They will almost certainly lack the ability to use the legal system to screw me over.

You're right, we should just move our businesses to whichever countries currently allow the most exploitation and abuse of workers and race to the bottom. Why not just cut to the chase and implement slavery already? It's the most economically efficient method of production after all.

Slavery is not economically efficient at all. The fact that economists pointed this unpleasant fact out is what got economics tagged with the phrase "the dismal science".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dismal_science

I think you misunderstand the article, the term comes from Carlyle rejecting the free market as a philosophical principle, not some efficiency analysis. And in fact his essay was a defense of plantation owners whose businesses were failing because they had just lost access to extremely efficient slave labor thanks to inconvenient regulations.

If the economy were a little more global back then, those plantation owners should have moved their businesses to different, more slavery/business-friendly countries rather than adapt to the new human rights the workers had been given, no?

Yes, the "philosophical principle" Carlyle was rejecting is economic efficiency. Slavery is not efficient because the world might contain a more productive employment opportunity for a slave, which the slave would freely choose if given the opportunity.

I have absolutely no idea why you wish to portray slavery as economically efficient. Is it truly your belief that welfare is maximized with some people enslaved? (I suppose this is not a particularly uncommon left wing view, but it's very rarely stated so explicitly.)

I think the ways we are using the phrase 'economically efficient' are different, and that's where much of the disagreement lies. In fact I'd reject the notion of the existence of a universal objective welfare function. If you include the welfare of slaves in your calculation certainly I'd agree that the system is inefficient; but since when has any slave owner done that?

It's actually an extremely uncommon (nonexistent) left wing view that welfare is maximized with some people enslaved. Literally nobody believes that and I certainly hope for your sake that you don't believe anyone believes that and are just trying to be incendiary. It is a very common view among most people (since it's the truth) that the welfare of /certain people/ is maximized with /certain other people/ enslaved. And then we can conclude if the first group has economic power and is subject to no regulation and act according to maximizing their economic welfare, they will implement it.

The contention is that your position, that businesses should refuse to operate in countries which regulate rights into existence since these rights have costs which hurt the bottom line of the business, if adopted leads directly and immediately to slavery. Slavery is unquestionably disgusting and reprehensible, so therefore your position, which leads to an unacceptable result, cannot be accepted.

So I'm suggesting that the /subjective/ welfare of people in a position to own slaves (wealthy business owners) is maximized under slavery. And from that I conclude the maximization of the welfare of wealthy business owners -- the natural result of unfettered capitalism -- is something to be categorically rejected. So we need fetters.

It's actually an extremely uncommon (nonexistent) left wing view that welfare is maximized with some people enslaved. Literally nobody believes that...

Simply not true. Several elected officials believe or previously believed that, and some proposed legislation for that purpose:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_National_Service_Act

http://thehill.com/policy/defense/236365-rangel-renews-call-...

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/111/hr5741/text

http://www.infowars.com/obama-camp-scrubs-website-to-remove-...

And then we can conclude if the first group has economic power and is subject to no regulation and act according to maximizing their economic welfare, they will implement it.

Yet strangely, that doesn't seem to happen. Multinationals with huge economic power and subject to minimal regulation tend to treat employees better than smaller and weaker local companies (at least in India, the US, and other places I'm familiar with).

I don't dispute much of what you wrote about why we shouldn't do business with those who practice slavery. I'd draw a very clear bright line: do workers agree to their terms of work? In India or the US, the vast majority of IT workers do. I guess you want to go further and tell my employer/me what work conditions are acceptable?

Okay, if you define a required short limited period of service for public good as slavery then sure most civilized and uncivilized countries implement it and many people support it. I'll concede this point, though I don't think there's very many people in this universe who would use the word 'slavery' to describe this so you may be a unique snowflake in this regard.

I think the reason multinationals treat employees better is because that since they are multinational, they are a single company subject to the laws of every nation: it is more efficient for them to treat EVERYONE by the same rights as the most stringent (Europe) whereas companies local to India or the US can abuse the lack of rights these countries give workers since they only deal with local workers.

And I would agree with you about consent being the big bright line. Except I think consent is very complicated. If you allowed people to sign themselves into slavery, people would consent to slavery. No matter how awful something is, if it's allowed, people will "consent" to it -- the most desperate in society are forced by circumstances to consent to it. I think the word consent only has meaning when there are other meaningful options available. Which I think is the fundamental difference: the definition of consent. We all agree if someone puts a gun to your head and demands consent it's not consent: but what if a faceless nameless system forces you to die or consent to whatever some collection of business owners demand and you agree: is this consent or not? I say not really.

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