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Comment by cpwright | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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 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.

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