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Comment by foepys | Hacker News Reader

And people wonder why birth rates are falling and people are afraid to make long term commitments.

Corporations like this don't deserve any loyalty. If I worked there and anybody offered to pay me even a few percent more, I'd leave in a heartbeat. I probably wouldn't even work hard, only the bare minimum to not get fired, because why should I? In conservative media this this is being spun as "nobody wants to work anymore because millennials and gen Z are lazy" but the real reason is very obvious for anybody under 30: as a corporate employee hard work doesn't pay off most of the time, instead you will be fired when shareholders are in danger of losing a few dollars.

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People by and large do not exercise loyalty to their employers. This is why companies pay "sign up" bonus, so people could switch jobs over a relatively small bump (otherwise you'd lose a month or two of salary, which would push you into a net negative for almost two years over a 10% bump), and why the bonuses/RSU grants vest on a schedule (so you always have some money to lose when you resign).

Companies that work on loyalty do not have anything of the above, as their loyal employees won't be persuaded by a bigger TC number. Their TC is not high and they are not public too. It would be bizarre for somebody who went to Google or other such company because of the TC (likely applying to multiple jobs out of school or resigning from the previous job) to expect loyalty from the employer.

Do you keep paying a plumber once they complete their job? As employee I enter into mutually beneficial (and in case of IT and FAANG - extremely beneficial) contract knowing that I can be fired once the company deems my services no longer necessary.

The backlash comes from highest educated, best skilled people who received high salaries and who have great prospects of being hired again quickly. Why they suffer?

Should these companies not hire those employees in the first place? The employees would be jobless then, our would be hired by companies witch they previously rejected in favor of FAANG.

To me it all seems like reality check for people who for years were bit out of touch with, well, reality. This is what regular people deal with all the time.

Regarding your argument about falling birth rates - education, career, job stability etc. are all negatively correlated with birth rates. I'm pretty sure that FAANG employees have one of the lowest birth rates in society - I admit, I have no data to back this up.

If you hire people as disposable automatons and show no goodwill or loyalty, they will naturally do the minimum necessary not to get fired. So you need to add managers on top to make sure automatons don’t slack. But managers also cost you, and they will try to game the system all the same. So you add cameras and build butt detectors into chairs to see how much time people spend away.

For an employee, it is an arms race to dystopia slowed down by mountains of government regulation. For your business, it will never benefit from any employee’s full potential.

Free market only works if people value good will, good faith, reputation. Embracing a lack of these values puts you on a road that one way or another leads to authoritarianism or oppression.

[EDIT to remove the pot shot in the first paragraph but I still think OP has got to be trolling. But in case you really aren’t…]

Layoffs are bad because they are deceptive and cruel to those laid off and further erode trust from those not yet laid off. They are deceptive because being hired as an employee traditionally carries with it implied permanence that being hired as a temp or contractor (like your plumber) does not. You have a job unless and until your performance provides cause to fire you. They are cruel because they take advantage of the inherent power imbalance between employer and employee. The employee may be here on a visa, or just moved their family across the country, or has debts and obligations where he requires employment. He is harmed if the company suddenly and unilaterally ends the relationship. The company on the other hand is not materially harmed if the employee unilaterally decides to leave.

You can argue that a company is legally allowed to act in bad faith, but “barely within the law” is not a high ethical bar.

Who told you that you'll have a job until your performance drops? Was that the contract? You'll have a job for as long as you're needed to the company. Once your services are no longer required you'll be laid off. Why should anyone pay you if they no longer need your services? Is this the social contract in USA?

I see nothing deceptive nor cruel in it, unless Google promised not to fired these people

Now, Visa workers and people who moved should be taken care of separately, I agree. Firing them is not ok, at least not without extra compensation. However, are they a big percentage of those laid-off? Centering discussion about minority like if they are majority isn't helpful.

As for power imbalance.. Those hired at FAANG are one of the smartest people in the population. They should have known all of this and factor in all of this. It's hard to treat seriously people who make $300k/year and say they were cruely harmed because they were fired and now they may need to apply to another job.

I wrote this elsewhere, but I do not support Google. I view them as amoral, they make whatever is necessary to maximize profit.

People do make plans based on continued employment. Like, people move across the country and sign a year long lease for a job. There’s no avoiding that.

"Full time perm" means that the employer does not know for how long the job is needed, not that the job will be needed forever.

If there is no obligation for the employee to work forever, then there should not be an obligation for the employer to provide work forever too.

Unnecessary first paragraph on an otherwise great comment.

A better analogy is you pay your nanny to fly to Australia with you. You lay her off in Australia and get a refund on her return flight since she no longer works for you — she can find her own way back to the US.

And key here IMO is she is laid off without cause.

That would be true, if majority of those fired were visa workers, or people who moved across country. Is this the case?

No, it is still a good analogy. Going full time has a huge opportunity cost. Have you seen a typical employment contract? You assign all rights for anything you make during the employment to the employer. You cannot do open source stuff under your name unless you give up ownership. You are not free to build your business or gig on the side, at a sufficiently big company lawyers can always claim it is something that the company considered doing so you are competing with your employer and can be sued. Once you are fired, all you have is a name on the resume and hopefully savings.

And here the person in the middle of childcare leave additionally has no time to research job alternatives in job market where thousands are being laid off, so in addition to stress during already stressful time (how much sleep did you get for months after you had a baby?) there is now a hole in the resume that is always a red flag for HR. They are left out in the cold like your nan in AU.

The idea that the laid off people “completed their job” is just false.

> Do you keep paying a plumber once they complete their job?

The analogy is flawed.

You pay him until he completes his job. Or he will be pissed.

Google is telling the plumber to leave before the agreed upon work is done.

The plumber analogy is flawed but yours is not much better. When is the agreed work done for an employee? Employees are not hired to complete a specific job like a plumber is.

> Do you keep paying a plumber once they complete their job?

What an utterly stupid analogy. You never hired the Plumber as an Employee in the first place.

They layed off female employees on maternity leave just as they gave birth to children. No payout for the remainder of their maternity leave. That also contradicts your assertion of whether FAANG employees were making children btw. Google was horrendously cruel here.

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