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Comment by j_walter | Hacker News Reader

Exactly this. Financial situtions change but you still haven't to honor contracts that were signed. The 8K employees didn't have the same contracts as a long term spokesperson...that is not unusual at all...

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So what? Can a company not take responsibility for the lives of thousands of employees? Either don't be a headcount glut, or take responsibility for the damage you'll inflict on these real life people and their families. Why is the expectation from managers to be decent human beings is so unreasonable? Do we need a contract for that?

There is no responsibility on the part of the company to do anything other than what they agreed to do.

If employees wanted to be kept on even in a downturn, they should have negotiated for it, but I suspect the price they would have had to pay for that would make the entire prospect unattractive.

You just want to eat your cake, and have it afterwards too.

Well I know of other employers that do take in to account the impact on the life of they're workers and families, and will hire very conservatively, and would resort to firing only if very extreme circumstances. It's because they were not trained in American style business schools, where everyone is just a number, And there's no such thing as decency. You somehow believe this is natural, it's not, it's insane.

Hiring very conservatively hurts GDP and increases long-term unemployment, especially for unproven entry level candidates.

They actually like hiring new grads. Building slowly and soundly is not bad for the GDP.

Many things are done for the sake of growth at the expense of employees...however those employees generally get much higher salaries in exchange for that. There is a reason Google, Facebook and Apple are the huge companies they are...and they were all started in the US.

Companies like Intel are facing new realities in over hiring as well (not to mention overextending on new fabs)...apparently they preferred not to have layoffs but instead cut salaries, bonuses and 401k matching. Personally I would prefer to fire the bottom 5% than risk the top 10% leaving because of a short sighted cash flow play.

The obvious question is why didn't these laid off salesforce employees go get a job at the company that never fires people instead?

"But we had to do <terrible thing> because it's the law" isn't an excuse, just a different form of condemnation.

Why is paying a celebrity spokesperson terrible?

Because many of the engineers here either do not understand or are unwilling to accept that society operates in more dimensions than the technical and "rational". They see celebrity and functions like marketing and sales as inherently bullshit and unnecessary.

> "But we had to do <terrible thing> because it's the law" isn't an excuse

If the “terrible thing” you’re referring to is paying someone according to a contract signed then, yes, it’s an excuse for why they had to do it.

That’s literally how contracts work.

If you agreed to pay one person enough to do nothing that you have to lay off thousands of other people, I don't care if you signed a contract to do it—it's still worthy of condemnation.

All it changes is the timing of when the action worthy of condemnation occurred.

$10M/yr = 50x $200K/yr

Not paying him and getting sued for it would save about 50 jobs temporarily. Not "thousands"...

Changes the semantics, but not the underlying ethics.

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