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Comment by cinquemb | Hacker News Reader

And they also have less incentive to stay because these are supposedly people who could provide the same work for other companies in similar situations at the same or higher prices. I find myself in this situation right now: ill stay on at higher prices if the company wants to renew its contract, or i'll leave for another place (I have more people emailing me for work than I have before the pandemic and I'm not on any social media and don't have a personal website).

In an environment where businesses have been operating on massive leverage for years, there's a fight brewing over who is going to get cash-flows and who will not, this obviously extends to workers who have outsized impact on whether any given business will stay open or file chapter 7/11.

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If I'm at a place where people will lose their jobs if I leave the company the answer is simple: I don't leave until that's either not the case or I personally can't afford it anymore.

I owe no loyalties to corporates, I have other interests that I would like to spend time on and pursue more than convincing stakeholders to make decisions that should have been made long ago to have them avoided being put in the position they are now.

If people insist on making choices that will continue to sink the ship, I don't have to go down with it.

>If people insist on making choices that will continue to sink the ship, I don't have to go down with it.

I think this calculus flips around when your commitment has entered a stage where other peoples' livelihoods depend on it, basically. That's all. Get out before it springs a leak in an org like that, is my advice.

> I think this calculus flips around when your commitment has entered a stage where other peoples' livelihoods depend on it, basically.

For you, not for others.

> Get out before it springs a leak in an org like that, is my advice.

I'll be fine for a long time even if the company goes under, others may not though, I've seen it happen way too many times to not be prepared for stuff like this. And I can just accept an offer from another place rather than outright reject them.

>For you, not for others.

So I see.

>I'll be fine for a long time even if the company goes under, others may not though, I've seen it happen way too many times to not be prepared for stuff like this.

Yeah, and it's their problem up until the point at which the situation is unrecoverable without you, and even then it's still mostly theirs, but I would have a lot of hangups about acting in a situation like that.

> Yeah, and it's their problem up until the point at which the situation is unrecoverable without you, and even then it's still mostly theirs, but I would have a lot of hangups about acting in a situation like that.

It's business, things fail. The problem is that people have come to accept that things shouldn't fail has made it so that it has built up to the point where it is today. Id call this environment Dirac-delta solvency.

I mean, some things shouldn't fail. I would have less qualms about all of this stuff with a strong social safety net, but we don't have that in the US.

> I mean, some things shouldn't fail.

This is just asking for rude awakenings. History is full of these kinds of events of where people thought things shouldn't fail, never prepared for them, and they did.

> I would have less qualms about all of this stuff with a strong social safety net, but we don't have that in the US.

No one lives in an environment where one can miss-allocate resources indefinitely or under assumptions that somethings can never change.

> This is just asking for rude awakenings. History is full of these kinds of events of where people thought things shouldn't fail, never prepared for them, and they did.

When I say some things shouldn’t fail, I mean our collective ability to keep each other alive and well. Whatever business of the day can go fuck itself, I don’t care.

> No one lives in an environment where one can miss-allocate resources indefinitely or under assumptions that somethings can never change.

What assumptions are you talking about? I’m talking about welfare.

> What assumptions are you talking about? I’m talking about welfare.

Welfare takes resources, takes people agreeing on what resources are acceptable for welfare and what is not, resources people have to produce and distrubute at some cost, takes people who may be better at managing such costs or inflating them to outsized proportions… any country that has deficits growing larger and larger every year can not continue to provide welfare indefinitely without making hard decisions that not all people will be ok with.

Some people may decide to leave for countries that are willing to make those hard decisions, rather than stay in those that want to punt on it until they face an analogous dynamic that Chinua Achebe has described pretty well.

My point is frequently your world descends into a flaming pile of shit unannounced.

Go ask the career restaurant workers how the year is going. Go ask the tourism guides and travel agents. Go ask their bosses how they intend to keep the doors open with an 80% decline in revenue.

Short answer: you can't.

I don’t understand what your point is. You think I don’t get this? This is a thread about giving executives bonuses when the company is going bankrupt.

No, it’s a thread about rewarding executives for managing to keep any semblance of a company alive. A company that comes out of bankruptcy is much more valuable than one that doesn’t. The shareholders have to compensate the execs enough to entice them to go through that rather than leave for greener pastures where their shares won’t be worthless and they won’t have to fire people.

That seems to be the "common sense knowledge", but I see little evidence to back that up. Yes, certainly for a specific company, coming out of bankruptcy is more valuable than not, but I'm not convinced it's always a net positive for society as a whole, especially if doing so requires things like exacerbating our already messed up wage inequality situation.

I owe no loyalties to any company.

I actually liked the company I just left. I liked the people and thought that the people in management up to and including management were all good people. I am usually far more cynical.

Post Covid, they decided to give everyone a pay cut instead of laying off people. This was morally the right thing to do in my opinion. It is a small company and I didn’t feel we had any dead weight.

I knew that in my position, the company would struggle a little bit. But what was I suppose to do? Stay out of loyalty or accept an offer that was a 60% increase in total comp at a more stable company?

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