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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

The pandemic makes it easier to make layoffs you were considering otherwise. It gives both employers and employees cover by letting them point to big economic changes. I'm firing you because virus, not because I made a mistake when I created your department. I got fired because virus, not because I wasn't productive. It saves face all around, making jobs less sticky.

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On the other hand, my company has cut hours for the entire product/dev team by 20% (not sure what the consulting side is doing, I don't talk to them much) rather than make layoffs.

Makes me actually trust them when they say they have no intention to make anybody redundant if they can avoid it. They actually want to keep me employed if they can help it. The fact that I've turned up late 3 days a week for 2 years and never got written up for it attests to that too, I must be pretty good at coding I guess.

> turned up late 3 days a week for 2 years and never got written up for it attests to that too

I'm grateful I don't work at a company where you get written up for being late. Sounds like high school.

That's completely contextual to the actual position and responsibilities. Plenty of jobs require being on time.

Sounds like it’s not that important for this job.

If you’re late to standup 3 days a week, I’d consider that quite unprofessional.

Then standup is just a way to force employees to show up at an arbitrary early time.

I think I've never been in a project where standups were before 10 in the morning. At some point you have to decide if you're working in a team or not -- first people will leave the office around 16 so there's only a limited time window.

Nothing better when 9 people have to wait for or organize around one primadona that just take it as personal offence that coordination requires him to be somewhere at set time.

If you are regularly late to any meeting, it's problematic (assuming the meeting is worth having, of course). If I have a co-located team with good interaction that mostly works core hours, I actually don't want a standup meeting. Everything I would do at standup is easier to do by simply talking to the people I want to talk to. However, if you have a team where at least some people work remotely, or work different hours (either by habit or by time zone), then it is incredibly helpful to have a meeting where everyone can be together at the same time. People coming late to that meeting make it difficult to organise your day. If the meeting starts and you wait, it can be very disruptive. If you don't wait, then you don't get to talk to that team member -- who will often end up getting distanced from the rest of the team.

Having said that, many organisations have standup meetings that aren't worth the time they spend. However, I don't think you can say apriori that this is definitely the case.

> However, if you have a team where at least some people work remotely, or work different hours (either by habit or by time zone), then it is incredibly helpful to have a meeting where everyone can be together at the same time.

+1 to this. I work for an org that's on different coasts and, and different coasts in several countries. Synchronous and asynchronous communication is hard, and it's vital to have at least a 15 minute touchbase to make sure everyone is on the same page.

How many meetings are daily at 9am though?

Why does that matter? Being a professional means meeting your obligations. 9AM is perfectly reasonable.

I mean it's a useful meeting and therefor not arbitrary. If that's the game they have to play with us skeptically efficient types, I'm for it. I don't have a problem working, I have a problem doing BS for appearances sake.

It is also easier, California lifted WARN requirement, which required companies to give 60 day notice to employees when laying off a large number of them.

or when the tide goes out do you discover who has been swimming naked.

No, nobody was naked - the tide was just so strong that their swimsuits fell off.

I respectfully disagree.

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