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Comment by rdoherty | Hacker News Reader

I agree 100%. I've worked for multiple companies that say "we're a family", then lay off people with no warning or remorse. Businesses are not families.

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They're families when it benefits the business.

And businesses are cutthroat capitalists when it benefits them.

All that family nonsense is just to talk employees out of looking after their own interests.

Your relationship with your employer is inherently antagonistic, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you some BS. That doesn't mean you can't work well together, but sometimes your interests align with the company, and sometimes they don't.

Well there are degrees to this. Buffer seemed to want not having to fire people, but made a mistake.

You can compare this to big game companies, which have no problem hiring a bunch of people and then laying them off when the project is done. All the disadvantages of being an employee (IP assignment for side projects, low pay) with all the disadvantages of being a contractor (no income stability).

Companies do what they need to in order to survive, but that doesn't mean that the people running the companies are always 100% soul-less

I'm pretty sure founders at Buffer feeling real bad about firing folks doesn't make the experience any better for the fired folks. Three to six weeks of severance is a tight turnaround to get a new job, particularly for non-engineering employees or remote employees. And, guessing based on their ramp-up and lifo scheme, they're probably firing some employees inside their first 6 mos. ie they most likely recently left a job for Buffer. I understand there's no promise of lifetime employment, but that's a serious dick move.

This is one of those situations where having worked a retail job in your life can really impart some wisdom into you. Retailers often give their minimum-wage grunts this song and dance about "family" and "performance tiers" and all that- and the grunts will tell you that it takes a couple years for some people to internalize that it's all a scam to make you work harder for minimum wage.

Your employer will not take care of you. It is your job as an employee to make sure they meet you halfway.

Notably, handing out options does not fix this. All it does is give employees conflicting interests, which softens (but doesn't alter) the blow if there comes a moment that firing them is the best thing for their options.

From my perspective, it's not so much the "warning or remorse" (or lack thereof) as the fact that the company _will_ do it.

The Buffer guys clearly feel remorse, and wish they had better sense about warning. They regret that the layoffs are necessary.

But they are still doing it--which they should--its the people (including themselves) who deceived themselves about the relationship they have with the company that are in trouble.

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