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Comment by moron4hire | Hacker News Reader

>> You forget that the employees are also taking a risk.

I don't know how it is in most countries, but in the United States, an employee gets unemployment when they get laid off. A founder gets nothing when the company goes under.

Also, I know of a lot of companies that consider self-employment the same thing as unemployment. I've made more money as a freelancer in the last 3 years than I ever made working for anyone, and I've produced more code in that time to boot, so I think it's been a pretty good measure of my productivity. But as far as your run-of-the-mill cunsoltoware company is concerned (and let's face it, the long-tail of such companies is the majority of places where your average software developer can expect to get hired), I might as well have been on a 3 year vacation.

So IDK, seems like there are a lot more implicit risks to being a founder other than just "everything could go belly up and I have no retirement".

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> I don't know how it is in most countries, but in the United States, an employee gets unemployment when they get laid off. A founder gets nothing when the company goes under.

The $350 I got a week when I was unemployed three years ago doesn't affect much of anything compared to a developer's salary. I am fortunate in that I received 2 weeks severance and was able to get a new job within about a month; but not everyone is going to find a job within a time frame that having a drastically reduced income is trivial.

I lived in PA at the time, so maybe it's different in your state, but I got a lot more than $350 a week when I was on unemployment 4 years ago. It was about 1/2 of my previous wage. Considering I wasn't driving into an office every day, eating out all the time, etc., the money went pretty far. The rest of the shortfall was covered by just... not putting money into my retirement account.

And regardless, $350/wk is a lot more than the $0/wk a founder would get.

In Sweden (which is where the employees in question were), most workers are entitled to unemployment benefits of 80% of their full salary for 200 days, after which it's reduced to 70% for the next 100 days [1].

So a Swedish programmer will definitely be making much more than $350/week for almost a year while unemployed. Like someone else said, Mojang's employees did not take any real risks.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_benefits_in_Sweden

It's up to 80% of the full salary. While your typical Swedish programmer would get more than $350/week, they're not going to get 80% of their salary since they cap out well before that.

Oh, you're right. I missed the part about the 680 SEK / day cap.

Is that per calendar day or workday? I guess calendar day. That means the average programmer would get about 50% of salary on unemployment. (Just taking a wild guess that a programmer in Sweden makes 40k SEK / month.)

Wow, quite a little bit different from folks in mexico: 0%. Zero. Nada.

"I don't know how it is in most countries, but in the United States, an employee gets unemployment when they get laid off."

Thats assuming they were officially laid off, not let go for performance reasons even though it was actually company downsizing, and are eligible to collect unemployment. Since companies usually have to cover some of the unemployment payments they will fight unemployment claims or even fire a employee for a BS reason. So unemployment is far from guaranteed. IIRC IBM recently used those tactics in their latest mass layoff.

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