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Comment by hnal943 | Hacker News Reader

Why is it the company's responsibility to determine if you can afford to work for them or not? They would adjust their practices if the market demanded it.

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> Why is it the company's responsibility to determine if you can afford to work for them or not?

Using the word responsibility changes the meaning of this. How about we use a different phrase:

> Why [should the company care] if you can afford to work for them or not?

Because that's the point of working for a company.

The point of working for a company is to exchange services for money, not to feel cared about. It's the responsibility of the individual to assess whether what they are being offered is going to work for them. There's no hidden information here - had Talia done a budget she would have realized that her plan was not going to work.

The market is beginning to demand it, and Talia's story is one example of that.

If you want to understand why some people are afraid to speak out about the situation, you needn't look further than the backlash that Talia herself got.

That's not the market demanding it. Yelp could easily fire uppity workers and replace them with people willing to work for that wage.

I find it curious, then, that instead of doing that they're doing the exact opposite: increasing wages, tripling paid time off, and adding on 11 paid holidays.

That is right and I see most of startups and small business feeling the heat already. I left my last company for the only reason that with the salary they were giving me I could not even qualify for most of the apartments in bay area.

Fixing real-estate prices by deregulating land usage is number 1 thing government can do to help poor people in bay area but they wont.

The comment you replied to, and Talia's original post, is representative of the market demanding it.

The market demanding it would be Yelp being unable to hire CSRs in SF at their current wages and being forced to raise wages to attract talent.

That's one scenario, but there are others.

If enough consumers decide to stop doing business with a company because of the company's behavior, then that's also a kind of market demand. The article gives one example of such a customer, though it's unwise to extrapolate too much from a single data point.

Yes, but ultimately it goes back to being unable to hire at current wages. Let's say that consumers stopped doing business with Yelp and they did not raise wages as a result. Yelp does not have a monopoly and someone would create a competing business and hire away their employees. Yelp would either be forced to raise wages or do without customer service/go out of business.

The market and the mob are two different things.

Obviously they can do what they want, but does it make them good people? Not in my book.

> Obviously they can do what they want

Not in the most of the civilized world, no.

That someone agrees to something doesn't mean it does them any good. And while everyone is (or should be) free to accept bad deals, other people should be banned from proposing at least the most harmful ones. Hence the laws and regulations regarding employment, salaries and so on.

Well, this is from a European perspective, where there actually are such laws.

And what is unemployment in article's subject's age group in the Eurozone?

So if I hire someone, it's my responsibility to find out their living situation and expenses and calculate if they can afford to live on what I'm paying them? Personally, if an employer tried to violate my privacy that way in the interest of protecting me from myself, I'd walk.

No one is suggesting anything of the sort. An employer already does research into what generally is the normal pay and costs of living for their area. So generally speaking they know if the pay they are offering would put a zero asset person near the poverty line.

Isn't there room in the economy for jobs that aren't for people fully supporting themselves? Part time call center work would be an ideal high school/college job.

Right, so there are situations where it's not a bad thing. But let's get real, we know we're not talking about hiring teenage kids for after school work. That's not the core problem and not why people are discussing this. And that's something employers can account for during the hiring process.

I'm not willing to concede that - it's a call center job. The expected turnover in call centers is likely the same as fast food at < 1 year.

Here's how the hiring process went for this particular job: she walked in off the street and they hired her the same day. Does that sound like the hiring process you're familiar with for any job with a career path?

If Talia had applied at McDonalds and then complained the way she did, do you think her argument would be more or less valid?

I suspect were not going to agree and that's ok.

Everyone has different priorities and there's no shortage of companies putting a priority on profits/growth over taking the time or risking costs associated with looking out for others within our company or communities. I've avoided discussing Talias case because I think the problem is bigger than that. Even McDonalds shouldn't pay poverty like wages for their area. Even McDonalds can spend the time to find out if they're hiring a person just looking for supplemental income.

Also, maybe the turnover wouldn't be so high if they paid better.

It's not. They are free to make up their compensation. People are free to say negative things about that compensation. And the company is free to fire those people.

Sure, but that doesn't mean the criticisms are correct (or for that matter, that the compensation is correct).

For some reason it's okay for developers at tech companies to get paid market wages for their skills but not okay when it's CSRs.

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