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Comment by brianwawok | Hacker News Reader

Which is a great way to have a company full of people who can’t be fired with no motivation, harming the parent organization

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This is trade-off that a company (and thee employee, too) has to make:

- does the company want to be able to easily get rid of "undesired"/"lazy" employees? For this option, it will likely have to pay bigger salaries.

- on the other hand, for the option to have job security, an employee will have to accept that the expected salary is lower, i.e. the company can save money on salaries, but cannot easily fire the employee.

Both are economically sensible solutions.

Unless the company needs us more than we need it and we can have both better security and higher salary?

> Unless the company needs us more than we need it and we can have both better security and higher salary?

Employees typically only have such a strong negotiation lever in good economic times, which I guess is currently not the case.

this only applies to the very senior and experienced people, like staff+ engineers who are not easily replaceable + have so much knowledge that company will suffer if they leave.

the rest of your average tech worker who pushes jsons from front-end to backend does not have much leverage and is easily replaceable with new college grad with chatGPT

Exactly why I would run far away from any workplace that unionized.

Because you get paid less and have to strike for a small raise.

Usually people can still be fired if they aren't performing their contractual obligations. That might get tricky for stuff like code, but the same can be said of the current performance structure.

Hanging the threat of layoffs over employees certainly motivates employees, in much the same way stack ranking does, but it does it in such a way that is ultimately destructive to the organization.

Presumably striking isn't a great sign of motivation already. If you think you're so unimpactful that your job is at risk, you probably aren't very motivated.

Layoffs at big companies have nothing to do with individual impact.

There might be exceptions, and with companies that are cash-strapped (or smaller companies in general) the situation might be different.

But for big companies, it's just a matter of the executives deciding that they don't want to invest in a specific org/project anymore ( or they want to offshore ) and if you're in one of the affected orgs/projects, you're out of luck.

But presumably NYTimes doesn't employ that many people, and even fewer tech workers

> it's just a matter of the executives deciding that they don't want to invest in a specific org/project anymore ( or they want to offshore ) and if you're in one of the affected orgs/projects, you're out of luck

This seems really simplistic. It's certainly happened before, but it seems ludicrous to just assume that executive whim is always the cause. Another reason is if a company is doing badly financially, something needs to change.

It's not an either-or. When the company's doing badly financially and something needs to change, the mechanics of figuring out what needs to change involve a lot of executive judgment, which is not necessarily correlated with facts on the ground as the members of specific orgs or projects might see them.

Your strawman is on fire.

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