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Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

The opposite is also true: as an employer, you are disposable.

I think, according to the comments I see on HN, it is a bit too much, on both sides. Employees get laid off for no good reason, we already know that part, but many employees don't hesitate to quit when the company needs them the most.

I think the system would benefit from a bit more loyalty, on both sides. You don't have to get married to your employer, but I have the feeling that with a bit more loyalty, both employees and employers could make more beneficial long term plans.

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I have a feeling you havent worked long because in the last 20 years of my experience I cant remember of one example where "but many employees don't hesitate to quit when the company needs them the most." was correct. It was always employees being let go suddenly and on a whim.

Yeah in my decades I've only once heard of an employer going the extra mile to keep a guy at a company.

Boss drove to his house in a Bentley and gave him the keys.

Of course the dude was making far more than a Bentley for the company, in a role where your value is pretty much visible on the screen at any time.

Stories where someone just quietly asks for a raise and gets it aren't flashy but happen often, I know of multiple

I have worked long. And I can think of many, many examples of people quitting suddenly and leaving everything hanging, in companies of various sizes.

These days I run a solo business. I do not want to have any employees. I've been burned too many times in the past — and my experience (generalizing horribly) is that most programmers think they are the cream of the crop, superstars that deserve salary, benefits, perks, bonuses, vacations, and fantastic treatment. But then it turns out that a) they don't perform as superstars, and b) the company deserves absolutely nothing in return, so people leave suddenly and without warning.

In the businesses I've seen, the relationship was very asymmetric, heavily biased towards the comfort of employees.

Entitled people exist in all areas, that's a fact.

But you are being too weird in your generalization that usually the table is tilted in favor of the employees. For 22 years of career I've never once seen it.

If you make yourself a niche consultant and can command insane fees then nice, but for everybody else they are just cogs that can and are replaced on a whim.

> It was always employees being let go suddenly and on a whim.

I don’t have that experience. Nobody in my circle has ever been let go. Meanwhile many of them have gone through 4 or 5 employers in the past 15 years.

> I don’t have that experience. Nobody in my circle has ever been let go.

In the last 27 years, I've worked for more than 20 companies. Maybe 5 as a contractor that didn't go FT. Many startups, some name brands. I have been let go (or ongoing contract not renewed) ~6 times - hard to know with contracting when it's sometimes a factor of budgeting. Suffice to say, I have quit far more positions than removed by the actions of my employers. I have been at my current position ~7 years with 1 promotion. I fully expect that I will be let go out of the blue one day.

To prepare for this, I save aggressively. I do interviews with other companies from time to time for practice. Meta, Indeed, Nintendo, whatever. I work on the weekends from time to time, trying new technologies and picking at the low-hanging fruit that might make me more robust in the job market.

This is the state of the industry and will be for the foreseeable future. Losing a job involuntarily sucks. Interviewing sucks. Looking for jobs sucks. All that being said, it's still the best way to get a better job (whatever that means to you). I'm an old man and I'm at the peak of my ability. I do wonder when it will go upside down for me.

I find this hard to believe but I will take your word for it, atleast now I know it can happen.

It is far easier to switch an employee than employer, as decision is made assymetrically - the decision maker, the manager of your manager, for example, has zero emotional investment in you, compared to you and your being accustomed to your place, social relationships etc.

EDIT: It is also true that too frequent switching jobs will have negative consequences for your employability; and high attrition, even if it becomes a public fact, would have little consequences for desirability of the job.

> The opposite is also true: as an employer, you are disposable.

Noone claims otherwise, but the difference is power dynamics and economic output of the state - if the unemployment is super low (like 1-2%) then it's super easy to jump jobs. But in regular, healthy market (3-5% unemployment) employer always have upper hand...

My working career spans ~25 years. Less than 5 of those years have I been a permanent employee.

Most people view this sort of employment pattern as being risky. It certainly has it's ups and downs but it does also mean you are never tied to an employer or really that vulnerable to layoffs or similar. I have had contracts cut short because of organisational crisis but moving on is usually trivial.

People make choices and trade-offs when they choose their employer/how they are employed.

I don't understand why people think a large or even middling organisation is going to consider individual employees over other likely more pressing factors like short and long term survival. I do understand why it would be painful and stressful.

I feel like there's a general shift away from contractors happening though, which is weird because at least in tech, it's often a strictly better situation for both employees and employers.

Contractors get paid a lot more than FTEs in the same position, employers save on lots of overhead for healthcare and stuff. At least for younger people without chronic illness, this is often a way better deal. Employers can not only have the truly elastic work force that they seem want, but they can also actually remove staff where it's not working out without facing some kind of lawsuit. And without waiting for huge rounds of general layoffs while they keep useless/ignorant folks for years and task more productive people with trying to minimize the damage they cause. And yet.. if you want part-time or contract work, it's crickets when it comes to find/filter. The increasingly monolithic staffing empires at big websites like Indeed apparently have so few of these jobs listed that they just ignore the filter and show all the full-time positions anyway.

I don't have a great theory about why. Could be the economy in general, could be AI removing the 1% of actually thoughtful recruiters from the loop recently, or changing tax laws, or employers just enjoying leverage while they use the classic healthcare/employment situation in the US as a cudgel in negotiations, or it could be the perverse incentives to engage in arbitrary hiring/firing to manipulate hype and stock-prices. If anyone can speak to this from the perspective of an employer (or better yet an economist..) it's probably an interesting story.

Whatever the reason, this is all so stupid. Why vacuum up huge numbers of people who are actually looking for stability and disappoint them, and refuse to engage with people who are looking for more casual employment? I will probably live to regret this, but I have wished there was a actually functioning market for gig-work in tech. More and more small/boutique consultancies are shutting down, staffing agencies still barely understand the domain they try to serve, companies usually don't want to talk to people angling for contracts showing up to FTE positions, and the scammy little ecosystem for temp-work in tech is probably little better than hustling on craigslist in the early 2000's. What's up with that?

I can really only talk about the UK but I'd agree there has been a move away from better paid technical contract positions. Mostly this has been due to policy change to remove tax advantages that can come with contracting.

For large scale organisations or government organisations navigating these sort policies just isn't worth it so they simplify it and apply the same policy to everyone, which means the risk/reward isn't quite as balanced as it used to be.

Ironically, for me at least this has increased what I make as I have years of navigating the landscape, but for others it's definitely less attractive.

The more insidious side of contracting is that there has been an enormous expansion in "outsourcing" contracts that are entirely about lowering organisational costs and employer responsibilities and are exploitative without any real benefits to those employed. The majority of those contracted in these cases are almost certainly made up of outsourced ex-employees or those that would in the past have been recruited directly by organisations. In the UK and local government departments are one of the worst, having been forced to make cuts to cope with diminishing budgets.

> I can really only talk about the UK but I'd agree there has been a move away from better paid technical contract positions. Mostly this has been due to policy change to remove tax advantages that can come with contracting.

To be fair, the pre IR35 situation was super dodgy.

To counterpoint that, I live in Ireland where there's absolutely no tax advantage to being a contractor (slightly less NI equivalent, way less benefits and a special dividend tax to prevent those kinds of shenanigans) and yet there appears to be a thriving contractor market, so it feels like there's more going on here.

Now a bunch of those contract positions are far too low in terms of day rate, so maybe it's just an attempt to cut costs while giving naive people what looks like a good deal, because they don't account for all the costs.

Except an employee quitting on an employer just means that the workload gets redistributed to the team.

When an employer lays off an employee, the result is immediate financial distress and the urgent need to secure new employment.

The power differential is substantial and cannot be overlooked.

How's the employer disposable? An insignificant portion of people can find a job in their field whenever they want.

Employees are more likely to quit than get made redundant. Therefore it would seem that employers are more disposable than employees. You can't quit a job for another job with a higher salary and then moan about being made redundant. Generally I think you hope for the best and plan for the worst. If you're a good employee then employers won't want to lose you. If you're not then what do you expect? You wouldn't stay with a shitty job.

> If you're a good employee then employers won't want to lose you.

That's very generously assuming somebody above you actually has a clue who's valuable and who is not, which I have to tell you that I have witnessed, yes, but rarely.

I would say then you have chosen the wrong employers. If you're working for someone who doesn't see your value then you're unlikely to be properly recompensed for it. Choosing a company with less hierarchy and more of a meritocracy would help.

...Which assumes I had a choice for a good chunk of my career. ;)

But yes, technically correct.

Is this an artefact of the US system of not having proper contracts? UK employers will sometimes set a three-month notice period for key employees.

> I think the system would benefit from a bit more loyalty, on both sides

Prisoner's dilemma, innit. The win condition is more loyalty from both sides, but each individual side benefits more from defecting.

US Employers will too.... I've seen 6 months at the VP level, a year at the C-Suite level

It's vanishingly rare for an employer to be more reliant on an employee than the employee is on their employer.

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