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Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, someone who gets laid off is not a victim. It's a known part of the deal of having a job. You might decide to quit and leave the employer. The employer might decide they don't need you anymore and lay you off. You both have that option. You know this going in and you both are supposed to make arrangements to be able to deal with this possibility.

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Sophistry aside, it’s still profoundly disruptive for many people. Whether or not they know there’s a risk, it means people are scrambling to reestablish their finances and routines, and in many cases that can have long-lasting impacts – people have to move, Americans have disruptions to their healthcare access & providers, and older people might never regain their old salary.

That doesn’t make it illegal, or even a bad business move, but it very much has victims. They’re the ones being sacrificed for the good of the company.

Exactly. My wife is a highly paid doctor, but she can only work at a children’s hospital. If she were laid off we’d be fine financially, but we’d still have to relocate the entire family hundreds of miles away.

Riot is offering a minumum of six months of severance. I agree, layoffs are disruptive, but this view that somehow if you get hired the company can't ever decide to let you go is totally bizarre to me. Plus, what you would be essentially arguing is that it would have been better to never have hired these people in the first place, which I strongly disagree with in the vast majority of cases.

People need to stop acting like layoffs are the worst, evilest thing that can happen. It's important that people are treated with dignity and a financial cushion, and at least according to this blog post that seems to be the case.

Maybe those people would have been otherwise hired by employers who prudently didn’t overhire and need to cut afterwards.

I think that's a fair point when you hear stories about people who are hired and then laid off within a couple months (or sooner). Nobody can predict the far future with accuracy, but those kinds of stories usually just point to corporate incompetence and the company usually could have planned better.

But when it comes to cases where economic and business conditions have drastically changed, I don't think it's reasonable that we expect business leaders to have crystal balls for years in the future.

> Plus, what you would be essentially arguing is that it would have been better to never have hired these people in the first place

If you reread my comment, that’s not there and I acknowledged that it’s sometimes necessary (many of the current layoffs are not but I also remember 2000 when a lot of places which had been unable to fill customer demand were abruptly without business). My point was simply rejecting the idea that people are somehow not harmed by this - it’s usually legal, something people should expect, etc. but it still has a big impact. I respect business leaders who are cognizant of that and treat people with dignity - for example, Riot doesn’t appear to be claiming this is performance based like a certain company recently in the news.

> Riot is offering a minumum of six months of severance. [...] It's important that people are treated with dignity and a financial cushion, and at least according to this blog post that seems to be the case.

It wouldn't surprise me if part of this is because of how much harder it (anecdotally) seems to be for game developers/designers to find new jobs relative to their non-gaming peers. I'm having a hard time finding data to distinguish the two (game devs v. devs, game designers v. e.g UX designers), but going at least from my own network, those in gaming were more profoundly affected.

If that's true on any broader scale, then putting people out with two months pay in an industry that could take four to eight months to find new work could be a bad look for the RIFing company.

I agree, but layoffs are not necessarily sacrifices. layoffs really are necessary sometimes.

Definitely sometimes, but my point was simply that whoever is being let loose is taking the downside. It might help their friends who are still employed but they’re feeling the most immediate downsides and likely will not benefit if it does save the business.

What about the millions of customers. Prices all go up then. Sort of goes against the bussiness priorities, most produce for lowest cost.

That doesn’t matter to them anywhere near as much as losing a job does to the people who were laid off, and it’s certainly not the case that prices won’t go up anyway.

Im not talking about the consequences of the layoffs for those who are fired. We agree on that front entirely.

But i'm pointing out that if all the agents in a market acted against the interest of the relationship between the bussiness and the customers, we would have much bigger issues than just layoffs. Everything would be unnecessarily expensive all the time, insufficient volumes and supply. Development would be slower. The companies trying to minimize costs and maximize trade between them and the customers is not just caused by greed, or resulting in suffering, these are the basic drives behind the survival of modern life as we know it.

You say that, but there are always cases of people getting laid off despite having positive performance reports, were hired shortly prior to RIF, were given assurances there would not be layoffs, etc. People don't continuously act like their jobs are precarious, even if the American system with its employer-tied insurance and other mediocre safety nets, should incentivize us to.

> there are always cases of people getting laid off despite having positive performance reports, were hired shortly prior to RIF, were given assurances there would not be layoffs, etc.

Right. And since we know this, isn't it basic common sense to ask yourself "what would I do if I lost my job tomorrow?" and have some savings and a plan? Especially if you're a relatively well-paid tech employee? It doesn't matter if you consider your job precarious or not, it's simply irresponsible to not be prepared for the possibility.

Sure and it’s probably a bad idea to walk alone in bad areas of town at night. That doesn’t mean that if you get shot while doing so that you aren’t a victim.

The company is not mugging anyone. They are exercising their right to end a voluntary association. This is a perfectly valid choice that either party of the employment relationship may make. If you usually shop at grocery store A and you decide you don't want to any more and shop at grocery store B instead, you're not "victimizing" grocery store A.

No one said that a company is mugging anyone. The point of the analogy is that failure to prepare doesn’t preclude being a victim.

Most societies recognize that the employer to employee relationship is unbalanced in favor of the employer in a way that consumer to grocery store isn’t.

Unemployment insurance, and severance requirements wouldn’t be necessary if the relationship were really the equally balanced market transaction you think that it is.

Even the executives who do the laying off recognize the harm they are causing. I’ve been on calls with CEOs who were crying because they recognized (or wanted to appear that they recognized) the harm they were causing even if they thought it was justified.

Victim is a perfectly reasonable word to describe the people on the receiving end of that harm.

More than a fifth of Americans have no savings. At a certain point of spread, irresponsibility stops being a matter of personal character and becomes a systemic problem that concerns the public interest.

https://www.newsweek.com/americans-have-burned-through-their...

And there's a systemic solution, called unemployment insurance, that every company is required to pay into, and they pay more when they lay people off. What else would you have us do?

These are grown professional adults we're talking about, not helpless wards of the state. It's not unreasonable to expect people to be able to take care of themselves.

Decouple health insurance from employment, for starters.

I don't necessarily disagree, but we're getting into the weeds here. My point is just that choosing to voluntarily end a business arrangement, within the the terms of the agreement, does not constitute "victimizing" someone. Otherwise, the employer could claim they're a victim when an employee quits. A store could claim they're a victim if a customer starts shopping at a different store, and so on. It's ridiculous.

The tendency to cry victimhood at every obstacle is pernicious and debilitating to those who practice it. I would encourage people to avoid it.

The way I see it, mass layoffs are one of those situations where it feels unjust. A company might have acted incompetently, even recklessly, leading to people’s lives get disrupted. Are the executives culpable or were they victims of economic fortunes? Who knows? Either way, their positions often don’t change afterwards, and the companies stock price will usually rise as expenses fall with their workforce.

So you have one set of people suffering, and others connected to the suffering being unaffected. Whether that connection is causation is up to interpretation. Either way the ethical calculus certainly feels imbalanced. You can use all the logic you want, but it’s hard to address the feeling of something amiss. It might not be arson, but it still feels like a controlled burn that went out of control.

Sure things can feel all sorts of ways, but an initial gut reaction is not often the best one. People can choose to see themselves as a victim or they can choose to see themselves as having agency. Deciding that feelings are immutable things that can't be touched by reason is a choice too.

A layoff can prompt suffering or it can just be a blip between jobs depending on how you prepared someone is for it. A person who chooses to exercise agency is more likely to take steps to prepare because they don't feel they're helplessly at mercy of forces they can't control. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Feeling like a victim, doing something about one’s predicament, making preparations to prevent it from happening again, harboring a grievance, refusing to accept the status quo - one can do all of this and more. People are complex and multi-task.

> Sorry, someone who gets laid off is not a victim. It's a known part of the deal of having a job.

Death is a known part of the deal of living, and car accidents are known risks of driving a car. That doesn’t mean someone who dies in a car accident isn’t a victim.

For many people there isn’t a realistic option other than employment.

This attitude of shrug and say “that’s how it works” seems common with older accounts.

You know going into this the next generation can come along and change the rules. Maybe the past should have thought about that before having kids shrug

Physics doesn’t put an obligation on us to serve the elders catechisms and chants. It does empower us to overwhelm through strength and raw numbers.

Throwing up their hands is not a good political position of the generations who need to trust the next generations won’t just drug them up and stick them in poorly run state care.

Unemployment played a large impact in my parents divorce. Which pretty much haunted me until 25.

Unemployment is also the largest contributer to male suicide in the entire world.

So while they are not victims of a crime or mistreatment, they are certainly victims of circumstance.

This is all true, but acknowledging the harms caused to lives by layoffs is unpopular with the bootlicking type that's so prominent on HN.

People are right to want to see real, impactful consequences for leaders who "take full responsibility" because if they in fact are taking it, they're taking responsibility the bad choices and mismanagement that lead to the layoffs and the consequences of said layoffs.

People are tired of leadership huffing their own farts, posting a teary eyed message, and continuing their lives like nothing ever happened.

If I fucked up and had an adverse effect on hundreds, possibly thousands of lives tomorrow I'd be fired on the spot, rightfully so too.

> Unemployment is also the largest contributer to male suicide in the entire world.

Imagine how many people have already tried, or succeeded as a direct result of layoffs in the last year as a direct consequence of mass layoffs. It's sickening to think about.

I think the fed has a lot to do with the layoffs.

Anyone could have reasonably foreseen interest rate increases from historic lows, but of course company leaders got greedy and now those under them have to suffer for it.

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